A beautifully executed, character-driven tale of family, courage, resilience, and the meaning of what is right.
Latine seventh grader Wendy Celestina Toledo loves outer space, but she’s worried about things happening right here on Earth.
After a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on her community leads to disappearances of several people she knows, including her best friend, Wendy and her Salvadoran-Guatemalan family move to a new neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. Aspiring astronomer Wendy enters a school for gifted and talented students, makes a diverse group of new friends, and sets her sights on building a telescope and winning the science fair. However, with ICE vans patrolling the streets and a woman named Luz claiming sanctuary in the church down the street, her parents are fearful. Not only are Wendy and her friends enduring racist bullying at school, but someone Wendy loves is seriously threatened, and she must tap into her own inner resources to do what’s right for herself and those she cares for. The stakes start out high but manage to continue to build throughout the story, culminating in an unexpected plot twist. Heavy topics like bullying, familial hardship, and academic pressures are explored in ways middle-grade readers will understand and are grounded in well-rounded characterization. Readers will resonate with the characters’ three-dimensional personalities regardless of their and their families’ own immigration experiences.
A beautifully executed, character-driven tale of family, courage, resilience, and the meaning of what is right. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780063255487
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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
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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