A layered, utterly readable novel about a biracial protagonist grappling with dyslexia.
Eleven-year-old Maple Mehta-Cohen loves words.
She loves hearing her father read books aloud to her before bedtime, and she loves dictating her own stories into the digital voice recorder that she keeps in her pocket at all times—she dreams up mysteries about a sleuth called Mira Epstein-Patel. Maybe that’s why it took until fifth grade for a teacher to finally notice that Maple has serious struggles with reading. After screening tests reveal that she exhibits characteristics of dyslexia, Maple learns that, unlike her best friends, she is going to have to repeat the fifth grade. Although her friends assure her that nothing has to change between them, on the first day of school, they ignore her. In her new fifth grade classroom, Maple tries to connect with people, but her attempts are tripped up by her embarrassment, and she lies about why she’s been held back. Struggling with her friendships and her self-esteem, Maple wonders who she’s become—and how she can get back to being her old self, a person that she once truly loved. Maple’s narratorial voice is frank and quirky, and her journey with coming to terms with her learning disability is layered, believable, and well researched. Maple has a White Jewish mother and an Indian father who coined the term Hin-Jew to describe her. The book repeatedly references her Indian identity, but her Jewish side is less developed.
A layered, utterly readable novel about a biracial protagonist grappling with dyslexia. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1558-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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