An engaging first-person voice and convincing characters make this epistolary novel of friendship and girl power a success.
Claire, the only girl in her small Maryland island school, recounts her fifth-grade year in a series of humorous yet poignant letters to her best friend who moved away.
With Bess in California and Henry, her other best friend, ignoring her, Claire is lonely. She does have the girls’ bathroom to herself, transforming it into a cozy clubhouse where she can read and create wall drawings of her daily trials, which range from Yucky Gilbert’s relentless pursuit to kiss her to Webby’s bullying behavior. From the traditional annual elementary school square dance to the production of A Christmas Carol, in which she plays all female parts, from having hot sauce poured on her pizza to being tripped in soccer—nothing dampens Claire’s spunk. A champion in previous sailing regattas, Claire convinces Henry to crew for her; they are a team again. A touch of magical realism ensures Claire, Webby, and Henry’s success on their school project about local legend Smuggler Joe, thus cementing their friendship. Durfee’s cartoonlike illustrations nicely capture the book’s amusing tone and also affirm that Claire and her six classmates are white, though teacher Mr. Harper has dark skin.
An engaging first-person voice and convincing characters make this epistolary novel of friendship and girl power a success. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-82996-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
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