Sweet and memorable.
A middle schooler discovers that her prickly, estranged grandmother has a soft spot.
Catarina Arden-Blume’s father has not spoken to his mother ever since she objected to his marrying a Christian. He rejects organized religion, though Cat’s mom encourages her daughter to explore her Jewish heritage. And whether Cat feels awkward about it or not, she’s about to be confronted with it, because she’s been invited to her father’s hometown of Baton Rouge this summer, where she’ll meet her grandmother for the first time. Safta is a little scary, and Cat’s one-year-older (but far more worldly) cousin, Lexie, is more interested in sneaking around with her boyfriend than she is in hanging out. But adult discipline wins out, and soon the two cousins are working at Gerta’s, the family department store, a behemoth in size and local significance. When Cat investigates a storeroom Safta keeps locked, she discovers a trove of information that may explain why German-born Safta doesn’t like to talk about the past—and why the store’s employees so love and respect a woman Cat has only known to be intolerant. Narrated as a letter to Safta, this thoughtful story is at times melancholy and at times delightfully deadpan, more focused on the intergenerational relationship than teaching about the Shoah. Despite the tantalizing promise of the title, so few pages are devoted to the uncovered secret that its significance is easy to miss and the story could be read as a more general lesson on respecting elders.
Sweet and memorable. (author's note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-20364-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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