Strains to fit what feels like a forcibly imposed theme but should nevertheless find fans.
Lighthearted verses, many presented in graphic format, feature siblings, monsters, wild creatures, flights of fancy, and daring deeds.
In breezy, loose-jointed rhymes, Taylor moves freely between quotidian and fantasy settings. A sibling’s indignant rejection of a suggestion that little brother Max is “really slow” (“Others see what Max can’t do / but I see what he can”), for instance, is followed by a ballad of a lad so indecisive that he spends 100 years in front of a vending machine and a teacher’s gleeful revelation that she has hairy “monster feet.” The titular theme, which extends to specific labels for many of the poems and a “Feeling Index” at the end, not only includes non-emotions such as “Peer Pressure,” but also arbitrarily assigns just one feeling even to entries that contain several…and sometimes getting it wrong to boot. Still, in a mix of lavishly detailed sequential panels and enveloping single-page illustrations, Dorman catches all sorts of fantastical creatures, joining a large, racially diverse cast of children (including one young wheelchair user) in brisk action. Readers will find them all stimulating company—even a “humdrum” dragon bored with blasting castles who decides to take up a more peaceable hobby (knitting) and the Laziest Lady Ever: “But some people may argue my talent’s a bore / since I’ve laid here so long my face stuck to the floor.”
Strains to fit what feels like a forcibly imposed theme but should nevertheless find fans. (Poetry. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781639933075
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean.
A 12-year-old copes with a brain tumor.
Maddie likes potatoes and fake mustaches. Kids at school are nice (except one whom readers will see instantly is a bully); soon they’ll get to perform Shakespeare scenes in a unit they’ve all been looking forward to. But recent dysfunctions in Maddie’s arm and leg mean, stunningly, that she has a brain tumor. She has two surgeries, the first successful, the second taking place after the book’s end, leaving readers hanging. The tumor’s not malignant, but it—or the surgeries—could cause sight loss, personality change, or death. The descriptions of surgery aren’t for the faint of heart. The authors—parents of a real-life Maddie who really had a brain tumor—imbue fictional Maddie’s first-person narration with quirky turns of phrase (“For the love of potatoes!”) and whimsy (she imagines her medical battles as epic fantasy fights and pretends MRI stands for Mustard Rat from Indiana or Mustaches Rock Importantly), but they also portray her as a model sick kid. She’s frightened but never acts out, snaps, or resists. Her most frequent commentary about the tumor, having her skull opened, and the possibility of death is “Boo” or “Super boo.” She even shoulders the bully’s redemption. Maddie and most characters are white; one cringe-inducing hallucinatory surgery dream involves “chanting island natives” and a “witch doctor lady.”
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean. (authors’ note, discussion questions) (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62972-330-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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