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ASK MY MOOD RING HOW I FEEL

Balancing the heavy subject matter with generous doses of humor and an authentic young teen voice, López crafts a story that...

A funny and heartfelt story about a girl dealing with the trials of middle school and her mother’s breast cancer.

Until the summer before eighth grade, 13-year-old Erica “Chia” Montenegro has only had to worry about her ever-expanding Chia Pet collection, her annoying siblings and “close encounters” with the boys on her Boyfriend Wish List. When her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, Erica’s world is turned upside down. Readers feel the weight of the worry and stress overwhelming Erica as she narrates her struggle to balance a heavier academic load, increased household chores and caring for her 2-year-old brother so that her mother, exhausted from chemotherapy treatments, can rest. It only makes things worse that her mood ring seems to better understand her feelings than the Robins, her nosy group of friends. When Erica makes a promesa, committing to get 500 sponsors for her Race for the Cure walk, she finds it’s not an easy promise to keep, and she’ll need to be strong in order to help herself and her family make it through this challenging time.

Balancing the heavy subject matter with generous doses of humor and an authentic young teen voice, López crafts a story that blends family and middle school drama successfully. (Fiction. 11-14)

Pub Date: June 11, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-316-20996-0

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013

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THE MECHANICAL MIND OF JOHN COGGIN

A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.

The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.

Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)

A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)

Pub Date: April 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016

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DUST OF EDEN

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...

Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.

This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)

Pub Date: March 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Whitman

Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014

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