A compelling look at friendship and community uplift under harsh circumstances.
A boy and his best friend use a seemingly illogical trading system that ends up bringing a sense of vitality and a source of economic stability to their community.
Boipelo is a 12-year-old African boy who lives with his grandmother and father in Cedarville, located in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Food is scarce, unemployment is rampant, and often the family’s only source of income is Boipelo’s grandmother’s monthly pension from the social security office. But one day Boipelo reads a magazine article about a man in Montreal who traded a red paper clip for a pen shaped like a fish—a move that led to many more trades, including, eventually, a house. Inspired, Boipelo enlists the help of his best friend, Posto, to attempt trading, and though they begin with just a simple clay cow, the trades make a real impact on the community. A newspaper article about the trades leads to fame for Boipelo, but the journalist omits Posto’s role, and the boys’ friendship frays. In this humorous, optimistic tale, Krone explores the mutability of friendships and the perils of trying to hold on to them too strongly. Background information from the author discusses the effect the post-apartheid reconstruction period had on poor South African communities like Boipelo’s. A YouTube link is provided so that readers can hear the isiXhosa language being spoken.
A compelling look at friendship and community uplift under harsh circumstances. (glossary) (Realistic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-946395-66-5
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Catalyst Press
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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