Without sugarcoating crises, tenderly underscores how love and trust can shepherd lost kids toward hopeful futures.
A boy launches a lucrative business walking his neighbors’ dogs in order to help his family financially and to cope with big changes in his life.
After reluctantly looking after Amos, his family friend’s dog, 13-year-old Louis realizes he can turn a profit through dog care. He’s anxious about starting high school in the fall after years of home schooling and isolation from kids his own age. His dread is compounded by his family’s economic struggles in the wake of his mother’s being injured at work, losing her job, and going to an inpatient program for painkiller addiction. The stress of this separation also strains Louis’ relationship with Ike, his older brother, and Louis uses sarcasm and silence to avoid talking about family issues with his stoic fisherman dad and 11-months-younger sister, Faye. His dog-walking business, however, unexpectedly helps him make new friends among the neighborhood kids, and Louis begins to grow as a person and nurture new relationships, including a first love. Louis, who reads white, overcomes his hopelessness, and the novel explores how children experiencing stressful home lives often hide their problems and struggle alone. The story illustrates the central importance of building community and friendships as a key to surviving and overcoming difficult times. There’s also plenty of engaging canine content that will appeal to animal lovers.
Without sugarcoating crises, tenderly underscores how love and trust can shepherd lost kids toward hopeful futures. (Fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781481459204
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Problem-solving through perseverance and friendship is the real win in this deeply smart and inspiring story.
Leaving Brooklyn behind, Black math-whiz and puzzle lover Bree starts a new life in Florida, where she’ll be tossed into the deep end in more ways than one. Keeping her head above water may be the trickiest puzzle yet.
While her dad is busy working and training in IT, Bree struggles at first to settle into Enith Brigitha Middle School, largely due to the school’s preoccupation with swimming—from the accomplishments of its namesake, a Black Olympian from Curaçao, to its near victory at the state swimming championships. But Bree can’t swim. To illustrate her anxiety around this fact, the graphic novel’s bright colors give way to gray thought bubbles with thick, darkened outlines expressing Bree’s deepest fears and doubts. This poignant visual crowds some panels just as anxious feelings can crowd the thoughts of otherwise star students like Bree. Ultimately, learning to swim turns out to be easy enough with the help of a kind older neighbor—a Black woman with a competitive swimming past of her own as well as a rich and bittersweet understanding of Black Americans’ relationship with swimming—who explains to Bree how racist obstacles of the past can become collective anxiety in the present. To her surprise, Bree, with her newfound water skills, eventually finds herself on the school’s swim team, navigating competition, her anxiety, and new, meaningful relationships.
Problem-solving through perseverance and friendship is the real win in this deeply smart and inspiring story. (Graphic fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-305677-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperAlley
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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