Unique characters, inventive names (Comfort’s best friend Declaration, who betrays their friendship), a fresh voice and an...
Comfort Snowberger has attended 247 funerals, not because she’s morose but because the Snowberger Funeral Home in Snapfinger, Mississippi, is where she lives with her family.
In fact, the dead center of the story, so to speak, is the funeral home. When Uncle Edisto dies and then 90-year-old, great-great-Aunt Florentine, Comfort learns that “it’s not how you die that makes the important impression, it’s how you live.” A difficult belief to accept when tragedy strikes Comfort, her dog, Dismay, and her eight-year-old sniveling cousin, Peach, all caught in a flash flood on the way to Florentine’s graveside service. As Comfort clutches Peach to keep him from going under, Dismay is swept away. Despite the setting and plot, the story is not morbid but is an original celebration of life.
Unique characters, inventive names (Comfort’s best friend Declaration, who betrays their friendship), a fresh voice and an honest portrayal of life and death are a match made in heaven—and despite the bland title, a memorable tribute to the joys of living. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-205113-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Gulliver/Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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