Gingerbread is plentiful in this spooky “Hansel and Gretel” retelling, but the lessons about friendship are sweeter still.
Bee assumed her family vacation would be boring; instead, she finds herself haunted and hunted by the Gingerbread Witch.
Twelve-year-old Indian Canadian Binita “Bee” Bakshi is embarrassed by her family. Her father is loud, her mother is a cheapskate, and her beloved Granny incessantly hums show tunes. Most embarrassing of all, however, is Bee herself. Her frizzy hair, tan skin, and secondhand clothes mark her as different when all she wants is to fit in. Bee finds solace in horror books featuring the fearless Betsy Chillers taking on paranormal threats. When her family decides to spend a week without Wi-Fi at a cottage on Storm Lake, however, Bee finds that the lessons from her favorite series are far from hypothetical. Something in the forest is watching her, something in the water wants to hurt her, and she can’t shake the smell of gingerbread. As Bee works with new friends Lucas, who is coded white, and brown-skinned Alina to unravel the sinister mysteries of Storm Lake, she must confront ghosts both past and present. Full of twists, genuine scares, and satisfying reveals, this debut is sure to please readers in search of a thrill.
Gingerbread is plentiful in this spooky “Hansel and Gretel” retelling, but the lessons about friendship are sweeter still. (Supernatural. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780063275720
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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