A lush backdrop and sweet characters facing complicated problems will keep readers hooked.
A balmy Florida summer turns unforgettable for two best friends.
Peter and Tommy have been inseparable since meeting a few summers back. Even though they go to different schools—Tommy attends a private school for gifted kids while Peter attends his local public school—the rising sixth graders have bonded over a mutual love for animals and a desire to explore. Leaving the safe familiarity of elementary school behind, Peter is facing a summer of changes and challenges as he prepares to enter middle school. Peter and Tommy’s two-member Discovery Club seeks to find and catalog 100 unique creatures before the summer draws to a close. Discovery No. 95, a manatee, sets a summer of courage and activism in motion. To complicate matters, Peter has also been tasked with being his grandfather’s caretaker while his mom is at work, something made more difficult by Papa’s rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s. Secrets test Tommy and Peter’s friendship, and a devastating accident for the manatee pushes Peter to his breaking point. Now he must find the strength to stand up for the manatees and fight for his friendship and family in the face of difficulties. Traditional masculine stereotypes are defied by a gentle, attentive friendship between two boys who are able to cry in front of each other. Main characters are assumed White.
A lush backdrop and sweet characters facing complicated problems will keep readers hooked. (author's note) (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-309491-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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