A touching homage to the healing of old wounds and family relationships.
Two tweens and an old apple tree uncover a family secret.
Sonnet and her younger sister, Villanelle, move with their single mother from Colorado to live with their maternal grandfather in Indiana. Anderson Granger is struggling to process his wife’s recent death and is showing worrying signs of forgetfulness. Twelve-year-old Sonnet always wondered why they rarely visited Gramps and Nana, but Mom avoided answering her questions. Meanwhile, neighbor boy Zeke Morrison feels disconnected from his environmental journalist father. Zeke’s vegan family eschews technology, which he finds frustrating. After years of home schooling, Zeke just wants to fit in at the local middle school. Both Sonnet and Zeke choose Anderson Granger as the subject of their seventh grade oral history project (much to Sonnet’s annoyance). Initially unwilling partners, they grow closer as they work together, and their interviews reveal the secret behind Sonnet’s mom’s family estrangement. The mystery in this deftly characterized novel unravels from three different points of view—those of Sonnet, Zeke, and an old apple tree that witnessed the whole story. The personified apple tree, the last one standing in the orchard, faithfully interprets the family’s story in moving poems that are interspersed throughout the novel. The tree’s relationship with the family opens Zeke’s eyes to the deep connection between humans and the natural world, helping to heal his relationship with his father. Main characters are coded white.
A touching homage to the healing of old wounds and family relationships. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780823457106
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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