Danziger (What a Trip, Amber Brown, 2001, etc.) breaks new ground with this amusing middle-school story illustrated in a novel way—with scrapbook art by the author done in the style of the sixth-grade narrator, Skate Tate. (Scrapbooking is the popular hobby of compiling photo albums and decorating the pages with stickers and special papers.) In diary-like fashion, Skate tells the story of her first stressful months at Biddle Middle School, when she must adjust to a long bus ride, a new building, different friends, and the sudden death of her adored globetrotting relative called GUM (the family nickname for Great-Uncle Mort). The first-person story is told in present tense, mainly in one-sentence paragraphs that approach stream-of-consciousness mode, supplemented with the addition of a few school assignments and scrapbook entries in different typefaces. Skate has lots of typical sixth-grade worries about her place at school and with her friend, but she has a solid, happy family life, and her wise great-uncle helps her with her self-confidence issues in some creative ways that support Skate’s budding talent as an artist. A 32-page, full-color insert of sample scrapbook pages shows photographs of Skate and her family and friends (using friends of the author for the models), including several pages detailing a family trip to Plymouth, Massachusetts. Danziger creates a believable, humorous world for Skate and her family, and GUM is a character anyone would love to have as a relative. The author’s scrapbook art may inspire readers to try crafting their own documentary pages. (Fiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-590-69221-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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
SEEN & HEARD
Using the multiple voices that made Bull Run (1995) so absorbing, Fleischman takes readers to a modern inner-city neighborhood and a different sort of battle, as bit by bit the handful of lima beans an immigrant child plants in an empty lot blossoms into a community garden, tended by a notably diverse group of local residents. It's not an easy victory: Toughened by the experience of putting her children through public school, Leona spends several days relentlessly bulling her way into government offices to get the lot's trash hauled away; others address the lack of readily available water, as well as problems with vandals and midnight dumpers; and though decades of waging peace on a small scale have made Sam an expert diplomat, he's unable to prevent racial and ethnic borders from forming. Still, the garden becomes a place where wounds heal, friendships form, and seeds of change are sown. Readers won't gain any great appreciation for the art and science of gardening from this, but they may come away understanding that people can work side by side despite vastly different motives, attitudes, skills, and cultural backgrounds. It's a worthy idea, accompanied by Pedersen's chapter-heading black-and-white portraits, providing advance information about the participants' races and, here and there, ages. (Fiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: May 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-027471-9
Page Count: 69
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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