Offers humorous honesty and heartfelt relationships.
All Al wants is to be a brain without a body.
Then she wouldn’t have to deal with her freshly diagnosed Crohn’s disease or her secret attraction to girls. Not to mention her very best friend and next-door neighbor Leo’s suddenly ditching her for the drama club. And the little matter of her own mom’s starting to date Leo’s mom. When all hope seems lost, into Al’s life comes The Bathroom Club, a truly nurturing inflammatory bowel disease support group made up of kids who are also queer. With new friends, a new crush, and Leo drifting further away from her, keeping her symptoms and struggles bottled up is becoming an insurmountable challenge for Al. Arlow dives into Al’s physical concerns, painting a picture both of the nitty-gritty of illness and the overwhelming embarrassments and anxieties of her particular experience of middle school. Al feels all things deeply and gets in her own way, traversing the highest highs and lowest lows on her journey to developing pride in all that she is. Her sweet romance with fellow club member Mina and deep friendship with Leo are strengths, and the highlight of Al’s story is the camaraderie among a group of chronically ill queer kids providing each other with dignity and nonjudgmental support. The supporting cast is racially diverse; Al, Leo (whose dad is Filipino), Mina, and some other characters are Jewish.
Offers humorous honesty and heartfelt relationships. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780593112960
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message.
Two boys equally blessed with both talent and ego vie for supremacy in their school’s annual “creative storytelling competition.”
J is “by far the best artist in the entire fifth grade”; K has “become known as the best writer in the entire fifth grade.” Naturally, each one is determined to crush it in The Contest, and each decides an illustrated story is the way to go. The competitive boys try to undermine one another by passing along fake tips for success, each hoping to destroy his opponent’s story. K advises J to “write what you DON’T know” and to use sixth-person narration. “J’s Secrets to Drawing Really Good” are just as catastrophic and include drawing with your nondominant hand and inserting mistakes to keep readers engaged. Creative hijinks ensue. Craft and Alexander have become known on social media for the jocular trash talk they heap on each other; J and K are their fictional child avatars. As an internet bit doled out in small doses, their frenemy-ship is amusing; as a sustained story about storytelling, it’s thin on both character and plot development. Authorial interjections exhort readers to look up 75-cent vocabulary, often used in barbs directed at each other; the latter feel like in-jokes more than playful attempts to engage young readers. Kids may enjoy spotting references to popular children’s authors among the characters’ names, and budding authors and illustrators will benefit from the advice. J and K are both Black; their classmates and teachers are racially diverse.
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780316582681
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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