With this flying start, a young maker makes a strong bid for attention.
A high achiever patches up friendships and learns the value of asking for help when she overschedules herself.
For new seventh grader Mackenzie Miller, anything worth doing is worth overdoing—beginning with persistent efforts to get her divorced mom to use a dating app, continuing with Operation Make a New Friend at school after being ghosted by her old bestie, Johanna, and culminating in a frenzy of preparations and planning to raise funds for new band instruments. Whipping up friendship bracelets (step-by-step instructions are appended) and leaving readers breathless in the wake of her narrative rush, this budding force of nature pinballs through a lively intergenerational supporting cast featuring an extended clan of Pakistani Americans led by promisingly unattached next-door neighbor Zane. Sheera Mirza, Zane’s niece and a classmate who joins Mackenzie in an unorthodox after-school arts club, proves a loyal ally when Mackenzie finally admits that in trying to set up the looming fundraiser single-handedly, she’s bitten off more than she can chew. The transformative insight that it’s OK to ask for help leads not only to a spectacularly successful fundraiser, but, by the end, patched-up relations with Johanna and another alienated friend, capped by exciting hints that her mom and Zane might be turning into an item. Mackenzie reads White and has some Greek ancestry.
With this flying start, a young maker makes a strong bid for attention. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-60306-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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