A lightly magical story that thoughtfully explores friendship and developing a strong sense of self.
If only making a best friend were as easy as making jewelry.
Zariah Brown, a Black 12-year-old, is a friendship bracelet master—the ones she makes are popular at Hurston Middle School. She’s busy fulfilling bracelet orders, trying not to attract negative attention (her brother says that clumsiness is her superpower), and keeping up her straight A grades, but Zariah secretly longs for a best friend; she hasn’t had one since a painful incident two years ago. It’s hard to see Naomi, her former best friend, always hanging out with another classmate, Kaira. When Kaira orders a bracelet for Naomi, the despondent Zariah heads to her favorite shop, Flaming Heart, for supplies. The eccentric shop owner gifts her with a special set of beads, which Zariah later discovers will instantly make anyone her best friend. She quickly finds herself on an emotional roller coaster as she learns about the drawbacks of forced relationships and searches for the perfect best friend before an upcoming school event that’s just highlighting how alone she feels. Collier shows readers the importance of being yourself and not changing just to fit in. Zariah finds herself in situations where she must decide how to proceed and whether she wants to change to blend in. Text messages with her father, who travels a lot, offer great advice for tweens. The story also touches on the effects of social media.
A lightly magical story that thoughtfully explores friendship and developing a strong sense of self. (best friend bracelet profile) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780063326163
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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