This ambling tale takes too long to get going.
A skeptic finds herself caught up in paranormal shenanigans.
Bernard situates readers in Southern, swampy, alligator-populated Bohring, amid the debris of 11-year-old Karis “Kick” Winter’s explosion. Kick plans a career in STEM, like her “super scientist” mother, Dr. Georgia Winter, who leaves Kick with her admittedly fake-psychic and quite stylish mother, Grandma Missouri, at her home, the Hollows. Kick’s visit coincides with the 100-year occurrence of the town’s curse, in which “the children turned into monsters and took over the town.” Kick’s scientific mind dismisses the lore, which comes with a nursery rhyme, even as she lies about being a psychic to fit into her new school. This strategy backfires when one of the mean-girl bullies demands that she use that ability to remove the curse. Then Kick smells the “porta potty” odor and sees a “smear of glowing green” and “horrible figures,” and she wonders if science can so easily dismiss these supernatural phenomena…and, halfway through the book, readers will wonder if the plot will pick up or stay plodding along. When done well, Southern ease, as heard in its legendary drawl and tasted in its cuisine, slows the pace to an elegant, earthy perfection. Alas, here Bernard’s use of the Southern idiom just bogs her plot down. There are some secondary characters of color, but most of the cast presents white. Several of Kick’s experiments are appended.
This ambling tale takes too long to get going. (Paranormal adventure. 8-12)Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-368-02855-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
A candid and powerful reckoning of history.
Summer is off to a terrible start for 12-year old African-American Candice Miller.
Six months after her parents’ divorce, Candice and her mother leave Atlanta to spend the summer in Lambert, South Carolina, at her grandmother’s old house. When her grandmother Abigail passed two years ago, in 2015, Candice and her mother struggled to move on. Now, without any friends, a computer, cellphone, or her grandmother, Candice suffers immense loneliness and boredom. When she starts rummaging through the attic and stumbles upon a box of her grandmother’s belongings, she discovers an old letter that details a mysterious fortune buried in Lambert and that asks Abigail to find the treasure. After Candice befriends the shy, bookish African-American kid next door, 11-year-old Brandon Jones, the pair set off investigating the clues. Each new revelation uncovers a long history of racism and tension in the small town and how one family threatened the black/white status quo. Johnson’s latest novel holds racism firmly in the light. Candice and Brandon discover the joys and terrors of the reality of being African-American in the 1950s. Without sugarcoating facts or dousing it in post-racial varnish, the narrative lets the children absorb and reflect on their shared history. The town of Lambert brims with intrigue, keeping readers entranced until the very last page.
A candid and powerful reckoning of history. (Historical mystery. 8-12)Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-545-94617-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Levine/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
PROFILES
Tenderly resonant and memorable.
Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.
Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century small-town setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.
Tenderly resonant and memorable. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231052
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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