A sweet story for children dealing with change.
Nine-year-old Flora experiences the loss of a pet, the separation of her parents, and the start of fourth grade, but a year of good changes is in store for her.
It’s 1972, and Flora Smallwood loves growing up in the small town of Rosetown, Indiana. She especially enjoys reading three times a week in the purple velveteen chair at Wings and a Chair Used Books. Flora needs the respite: She just lost her dog and is dealing with her parents’ recent separation. Fourth grade is starting, and everything seems different. Flora finds comfort in her old routines with Nessy, her best friend, and new routines with Yury, her new friend from Ukraine. As the year goes on, there are nice changes in store for her family and friends, such as new pets, lessons, and interests. From a third-person point of view, readers get a glimpse into Flora’s quaint, small-town life as she deals with all the changes, good and bad. Rylant shapes Flora’s experiences and thoughts such that they are accessible to all children, as Flora tries to hold on to the old and comfortable while adjusting to the new and different. The narrative is a lovely story of Flora’s daily life interlaced with hints of the 1970s. The book assumes a white default.
A sweet story for children dealing with change. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5344-1277-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
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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