An exuberant celebration of playing as a team.
Anticipating another happy summer at their (mostly) easygoing, co-ed sports camp, their friends are dismayed that Mack and Andre have chosen rival Camp Killington instead in this third series entry.
Selfless reasons prompted the two to switch to the chilly baseball meritocracy with its country-club ambience. While stellar athletes like Andre are awarded private rooms with hotel amenities; less-stellar campers like Mack are housed in dorms. Hypercompetitive Killington coaches know Andre’s talents, yet opportunities to play are few. Roused at night to mow a croquet pitch, he and Mack wonder if Killington’s resident star, the nephew of an influential Hall of Famer, is responsible. When, without notice, Mack is dispatched to Camp Average, he discovers his cabin’s full, now housing boys from Camp Hortonia who nurse grudges against their hosts. Intracabin friction culminates in an ill-advised bet between Average and Hortonia, to be settled by a game of ball hockey. Average’s far weaker team needs every player—even ball-hockey nonenthusiast Mack. Coached by team captain Cassie, with tech support and camper/videographers Nelson and Wi-Fi on hand to document everything, Mack swallows his humiliation and works on his game. If the plot occasionally strains credulity, the narrative shines when depicting the sports alchemy that transforms diverse young players of varying athletic interests and abilities into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
An exuberant celebration of playing as a team. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77147-405-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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