Not meaty but an entertaining, comfortably predictable path through solving the puzzle of sibling rivalry
A 12-year-old Londoner hopes that solving a 75-year-old puzzle will mend her relationship with her big sister.
The blonde, white English friend from My Secret Guide to Paris (2014) stars in her own adventure. A week after returning from Paris, Phoebe's exasperated with her sister, Alice, who talks of nothing but her Parisian romance and her university applications. A flea-market find from the holiday—one Phoebe suspects is worth rather more than the 10 euros she paid for it—gives her the seed of an idea. Hidden in the antique Cartier compact is a letter from a girl in 1941 to her sister, a wartime evacuee living in the countryside. The letter contains a puzzling series of steps that will "bring two people together"; could it mend the relationship between Phoebe and Alice? Though she's a native, Phoebe takes a tourist's view of London as she follows the magical instructions, whether it's making a wish in Trafalgar Square or traveling from Kensington Gardens while reminiscing about the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. History lessons abound; one construction worker who opens with informal and dated slang ("crikey") later recites a tidy, encyclopedia-style summary of the history of Wilton's Music Hall.
Not meaty but an entertaining, comfortably predictable path through solving the puzzle of sibling rivalry . (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-90734-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean.
A 12-year-old copes with a brain tumor.
Maddie likes potatoes and fake mustaches. Kids at school are nice (except one whom readers will see instantly is a bully); soon they’ll get to perform Shakespeare scenes in a unit they’ve all been looking forward to. But recent dysfunctions in Maddie’s arm and leg mean, stunningly, that she has a brain tumor. She has two surgeries, the first successful, the second taking place after the book’s end, leaving readers hanging. The tumor’s not malignant, but it—or the surgeries—could cause sight loss, personality change, or death. The descriptions of surgery aren’t for the faint of heart. The authors—parents of a real-life Maddie who really had a brain tumor—imbue fictional Maddie’s first-person narration with quirky turns of phrase (“For the love of potatoes!”) and whimsy (she imagines her medical battles as epic fantasy fights and pretends MRI stands for Mustard Rat from Indiana or Mustaches Rock Importantly), but they also portray her as a model sick kid. She’s frightened but never acts out, snaps, or resists. Her most frequent commentary about the tumor, having her skull opened, and the possibility of death is “Boo” or “Super boo.” She even shoulders the bully’s redemption. Maddie and most characters are white; one cringe-inducing hallucinatory surgery dream involves “chanting island natives” and a “witch doctor lady.”
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean. (authors’ note, discussion questions) (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62972-330-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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