A powerful, vibrant, and empowering celebration of an important milestone.
Sixteen short stories and poems from well-known and award-winning authors explore how young people experience and celebrate their periods.
The protagonists in this excellent, accessible middle-grade collection are all tweens and teens who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color with different cultural and faith-based beliefs, traditions, and reservations about their periods. Christina Soontornvat’s sweet and funny opening story, “The Rules of the Lake,” places a sixth grader’s first period during a much-anticipated field trip to a lake. In Ibi Zoboi’s touching “Bloodline,” 12-year-old Adjoa participates in a New Moon Rebirth ceremony in which she receives a special gift passed down from mothers to daughters in her family. Erin Entrada Kelly’s “Mother Mary, Do You Bleed?” follows a Filipina American Catholic girl who contemplates whether Jesus’ mother also had her period. While most of the stories are heartwarming and emphasize renewal and rest, the authors also delve into how their characters deal with challenges like sexism, racism, microaggressions, immigration, religion, deadnaming (one character is nonbinary), addiction, divorce, and grief. Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s emotionally resonant “Ofrendas,” for example, features three sisters, 10, 12, and 13, reeling in the aftermath of their mother’s sudden death. This is a memorable anthology featuring uniformly strong entries from broadly diverse voices that delve into the subject matter in ways ideally suited to the target audience.
A powerful, vibrant, and empowering celebration of an important milestone. (letter from the editors, resources) (Anthology. 9-13)Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1634-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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