This lightly spooky story demonstrates the complexities of preteen girl relationships.
Working in a scary house helps two preteens both connect and find their own identities.
It’s always been EmmaandOlivia, until Emma shoplifts a tube of lipstick and her identical twin, Olivia, takes the blame so Emma can still attend the summer camp of her dreams. Forced to enroll in another camp, the one for Bad Kids who need “positive redirection,” Olivia’s summer gets even worse when Ruby appears in her group. Even though Emma and Ruby had a falling-out over a boy, Olivia still blames Ruby’s friendship with Emma for straining her own relationship with Emma. The only good thing about this “camp” is cataloging artifacts from Live Oak House rather than picking trash—until creepy dolls talk, the mansion seems hungry to eat them, and other oddities occur. But the haunted house really serves as a vehicle to bring these white 12-year-olds together. Alternating chapters in their respective voices reveal Olivia’s suppressed anger and need to form a life apart from her twin and Ruby’s misperceptions of Olivia and lingering grief over her deceased grandmother. As they work to solve the mystery of Live Oak House, Ruby and Olivia become fast friends while also encouraging the best in each other. Maybe they still need Emma—but on their own terms.
This lightly spooky story demonstrates the complexities of preteen girl relationships. (Mystery. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-16961-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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