Readers will fairly hear a laugh track in the background of this pleasant-enough tween-girl-sitcom-script of a story, companion to 2007’s The Invisible Rules of the Zoë Lama. Seventh-grader Zoë Monday Costello, aka “the Zoë Lama,” is used to being a sort of middle-grade guru to whom her “clients”—kids and grown-ups alike—tell secrets and turn for guidance. While she’s out of school with the chickenpox, a usurper—the seemingly perfect, sparkly “sixer” Devon (who has a few secrets of her own)—assumes Zoë’s role, dispensing advice in direct contravention of Zoë’s many unwritten rules and even plying her wiles to steal Zoë’s turn to host the class guinea pig for the weekend. Peppered with amusing spot illustrations, occasional IM exchanges and once-in-a-while typeface changes, the fluffy story of dueling diva-ettes is dressing for a few truly serious worries—housing issues, elder-care concerns and the terminal illness of a parent among them—which underlie the book’s more sober message of compromise, cooperation and compassion. (Fiction. 8-11)
Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-525-47891-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Simple, bella, un regalo permenente: simple and beautiful, a gift that will stay.
Renowned Latin American writer Alvarez has created another story about cultural identity, but this time the primary character is 11-year-old Miguel Guzmán.
When Tía Lola arrives to help the family, Miguel and his hermana, Juanita, have just moved from New York City to Vermont with their recently divorced mother. The last thing Miguel wants, as he's trying to fit into a predominantly white community, is a flamboyant aunt who doesn't speak a word of English. Tía Lola, however, knows a language that defies words; she quickly charms and befriends all the neighbors. She can also cook exotic food, dance (anywhere, anytime), plan fun parties, and tell enchanting stories. Eventually, Tía Lola and the children swap English and Spanish ejercicios, but the true lesson is "mutual understanding." Peppered with Spanish words and phrases, Alvarez makes the reader as much a part of the "language" lessons as the characters. This story seamlessly weaves two culturaswhile letting each remain intact, just as Miguel is learning to do with his own life. Like all good stories, this one incorporates a lesson just subtle enough that readers will forget they're being taught, but in the end will understand themselves, and others, a little better, regardless of la lengua nativa—the mother tongue.
Simple, bella, un regalo permenente: simple and beautiful, a gift that will stay. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-80215-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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