A feel-good tween drama packed with positive life lessons.
Millie, Nora, and Bea, with help from their magical fortune tellers, have patched up their friendship and are looking forward to a summer adventure together.
In 2024’s Fortune Tellers, a misunderstanding, the pandemic, and family moves separated the longtime friends—until mysterious messages in fortune tellers they’d created years ago led them to reconcile. Now, after Millie invites them to her house on a lake in the Berkshires, the rising eighth graders, who are cued white, are excited—and a little anxious—about being together nonstop for a month. In alternating chapters, each girl reveals her innermost thoughts. During their vacation, the friends will also be running their own little summer camp for 8-year-old triplets. After some discussion about whether to share their special secret, they introduce their charges to the joys of folding paper fortune tellers and writing on them with the magical Write Your Destiny markers. Once again, the fortune tellers start delivering messages the girls need to hear, not necessarily the words they wrote, helping them navigate interpersonal conflict, crushes, and family issues. When they decide to protest some proposed commercial development of the area, the fortune teller messages encourage them. Greenwald expertly describes the emotions behind the girls’ experiences as well as the commitment that leads them to pledge to be open about their feelings with each other, and Millie’s and Nora’s Jewish identities are woven into the story.
A feel-good tween drama packed with positive life lessons. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780063255906
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
A real gem.
A 10-year old girl learns to adjust to a strange town, makes some fascinating friends, and fills the empty space in her heart thanks to a big old stray dog in this lyrical, moving, and enchanting book by a fresh new voice.
India Opal’s mama left when she was only three, and her father, “the preacher,” is absorbed in his own loss and in the work of his new ministry at the Open-Arms Baptist Church of Naomi [Florida]. Enter Winn-Dixie, a dog who “looked like a big piece of old brown carpet that had been left out in the rain.” But, this dog had a grin “so big that it made him sneeze.” And, as Opal says, “It’s hard not to immediately fall in love with a dog who has a good sense of humor.” Because of Winn-Dixie, Opal meets Miss Franny Block, an elderly lady whose papa built her a library of her own when she was just a little girl and she’s been the librarian ever since. Then, there’s nearly blind Gloria Dump, who hangs the empty bottle wreckage of her past from the mistake tree in her back yard. And, Otis, oh yes, Otis, whose music charms the gerbils, rabbits, snakes and lizards he’s let out of their cages in the pet store. Brush strokes of magical realism elevate this beyond a simple story of friendship to a well-crafted tale of community and fellowship, of sweetness, sorrow and hope. And, it’s funny, too.
A real gem. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7636-0776-2
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
SEEN & HEARD
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