A rousing read.
Cabby’s family are homesteaders in Kansas; fires and grasshoppers destroy their crops, but Cabby is determined to continue farming.
Twelve-year-old Catherine “Cabby” Potts isn’t aware that her parents may lose their claim until they force her to go work in Lady Ashford’s prairie manor. With no crops to sell, the family needs her wages. Independent-minded Cabby hates servitude and resents the classism of snooty Londoner Lady Ashford and her youngest son, Nigel. But that doesn’t stop her from matchmaking her sister, Emmeline, with Nigel, thinking the marriage will solve the family’s financial woes. To Cabby’s shock, although Nigel initially seemed interested in Emmeline, he in fact looks down on her. Cabby also discovers that Nigel and his associates are tricking her family and other homesteaders out of land they claimed for themselves. This storyline is juxtaposed with Cabby’s growing understanding of how these families acquired their land at the cost of Kiowa, Cheyenne, Kansa, and Wichita people. She becomes aware of the way her White neighbors disdain the town’s remaining Kiowa residents. With each episodic adventure narrated in Cabby’s first-person voice, Cabby earns the grudging respect of Lady Ashford and the trust of her Kiowa and White friend, Eli Lewis, a boy who works as the Ashfords’ groom. Throughout, she questions the nature of love and partnership, and, with new self-confidence, she ultimately exposes the fraudsters. Despite life’s uncertainties, one thing is clear: Cabby will determine her own path.
A rousing read. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956378-05-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Blue Bronco Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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
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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