A celebratory story of acceptance and creative expression.
At the theater camp of her dreams, an autistic 11-year-old is determined to be the star.
Maya can’t believe she’s going to attend musical theater day camp with “THE Irene Brown, legendary theater director.” And this summer, the camp will be putting on a performance of The Drowsy Chaperone, which is only Maya’s “favorite play of all time.” Obviously, Irene Brown will see that Maya is perfect for the starring role: She knows all the songs and everything about the show, and she even has a homemade shirt with The Drowsy Chaperone written on it. So why does Maya’s mother keep telling her not to take the starring role for granted? This is obviously just another one of her mother’s autism rules, like “Don’t chew on your hair” and “Don’t talk too much about musicals.” Maya’s even making new friends, but they get mad at her for no reason—she’s just trying to be helpful when she corrects their mistakes. She doesn’t want to always pretend to be “Maya in Public,” her most well-rehearsed role, but she does want to have friends. Can she be happily, obsessively perfectionist about theater and still be liked? Nuances and the messiness of growing up enrich Maya’s satisfying journey: Painfully, ultimately joyfully, she navigates the weirdness of friendships with neurotypical kids. Maya is white; Irene Brown is Black, and there’s racial diversity among the supporting characters.
A celebratory story of acceptance and creative expression. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781773218502
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
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