A heartfelt, if slightly uneven, portrayal of managing challenges in early adolescence.
Eleven-year-old Natalie Sellek, nicknamed “Nutty” for her fondness for Nutella, faces both an upcoming bat mitzvah and serious upheaval in her suburban Australian life.
Natalie’s family is struggling financially, and she’s been growing apart from her one-time best friend, Avi Gluck. Natalie shares interests (Harry Styles, The Real Housewives) with other girls at her private Jewish school, and she’s unsure how to handle her classmates’ bullying responses to Avi’s gender nonconformity, especially when they come from new friend and queen bee, Shayna. Natalie’s favorite aunt, Sarah, who’s queer, is grappling with depression, and Bubi, her grandmother (a caustic Holocaust survivor), is distressed about moving to an assisted living facility. Debut author Sussman resolves most of Natalie’s challenges rosily, though not without moments of anxiety for the earnest protagonist, including moving house because her parents can’t afford the mortgage, scaling back her bat mitzvah celebrations, and anticipating attending public school. A central relationship conflict is solved too easily, in a way that feels tied to underdeveloped characterization. Bubi stands out for her resistance to the book’s overall optimism: The complex expressions of her trauma and her discontented personality (devoted but never warm) provide an astute portrait of a vanishing demographic. Most characters are Jewish and present white; Avi is biracial (her father is implied white, and her mother, who converted to Judaism, is Chinese Australian).
A heartfelt, if slightly uneven, portrayal of managing challenges in early adolescence. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781761600517
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Walker Books Australia
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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