A sincere story that will leave readers feeling warm and hopeful.
A Black girl learns to listen to her own voice.
Maya Jenkins is a Black middle schooler living in Georgia who enjoys soccer, collecting fortune-cookie fortunes, and playing her flute. She’s good at soccer and works hard to keep improving her game, but a major motivation is how much her father loves the game and encourages her success. Although music makes her heart happy, Maya, feeling she must choose between the two activities due to time pressures, settles on soccer—although she continues to play her flute in secret. Now she’s ready to take on soccer camp and get one step closer to making the team her father used to play for. But the summer brings plenty of changes, and Maya finds herself spiraling as her world is upended when her soccer plans go off course, and her parents make a decision that devastates her. As challenges mount, will Maya be able to keep her head in the game? Collier masterfully delivers a multidimensional protagonist with a clear and relatable voice. Maya’s story includes heartbreak, healing, and explorations of strained friendships and familial relationships with moments of fun and joy interspersed. Each chapter opens with a fortune-cookie aphorism that highlights the emotional themes that are developed. Maya’s journey as she learns to adjust to life’s curveballs and listen to her inner truth will keep readers hooked from start to finish.
A sincere story that will leave readers feeling warm and hopeful. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-358-43464-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Versify/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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