A fun summer romp with honest portrayals of friendship woes and the pitfalls of well-meaning adults.
After returning to summer camp, besties Maggie and Nora start to drift apart as new friends and the supernatural come between them.
After last year’s vampire situation, Maggie eagerly anticipates the next twist Camp Sylvania might throw at them, but Nora doesn’t want anything to do with the paranormal. She can’t help but be jealous of Maggie’s friends from last year—and when Nora gets a cool bunkmate, Maggie likewise takes it as a threat to their friendship. The camp itself has undergone a New Age revamp, with the new director emphasizing the importance of chemical-free skin care products, primal-screaming workshops, a raw, vegan diet—and a glowing liquid called moon water. Then one camper goes missing, and others start to notice excessive body hair growth. Maggie and Nora will have to reconcile before their friendship and the summer go to the dogs—or is it werewolves? The girls’ differing reactions to the previous summer’s events and their strained friendship, along with the parental relationships portrayed, the new director’s genuine care for the campers, and the host of puberty references, make for a compassionate and complex presentation of tween life. Humor and clear storytelling in the narration (which alternates between the two protagonists) balance the heartfelt messaging, creating an easily digestible read. Maggie reads white; Nora is cued Latine. Final art not seen.
A fun summer romp with honest portrayals of friendship woes and the pitfalls of well-meaning adults. (map, camp invitation) (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780063347267
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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