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NEVERFORGOTTEN

An unmissable tale about loss and reclamation.

A 10-year-old boy’s ride to discover friendship and truth.

Fabio, who lives in Bogotá, Colombia, in a neighborhood that “used to be a town on the outskirts of the city, but the monster began to grow and ate the town,” has loved to ride his salmon-colored bike since the day his bus driver father, Roberto, taught him how. He rides it so often that it has become like a part of his own body, and he uses it to deliver his mother’s bread to the neighbors. That is, until the day when, without knowing how it happened, he forgets how to ride and falls multiple times. Fabio pushes his friends away, instead staying home and falling into deep sadness. As he delivers bread on foot to Mamalicia, their aging next-door neighbor who always calls him son, the two form an unlikely friendship as they deal with deception, truth, and loss. With quiet, emotive illustrations reminiscent of Allen Say’s and Brian Selznick’s, Rickenmann pulls readers onto the streets of Bogotá, where dust announces the arrival of the children who ride in bicycle packs, providing a view of busy streets and the barrio. The book is presented in both English and Spanish versions; Salazar’s translation masterfully replicates the distant-yet-confiding tone of Algorta’s Spanish original, fully conveying the story and its vivid images.

An unmissable tale about loss and reclamation. (Fiction. 8-12)

Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-64614-094-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Levine Querido

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021

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WRECKING BALL

From the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series , Vol. 14

Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.

The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.

When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.

Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Amulet/Abrams

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019

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CHARLOTTE'S WEB

The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...

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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

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