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THE PLAYMAKERS

A heartfelt mix of basketball, theater, math, and friendship that’s marred by stereotypical representation.

An Ohio boy puts together his own basketball team of mismatched seventh graders.

When best friends Jax and Nic are cut from the middle school basketball team, Jax impulsively tells their coach, “We’ll make our own team. And we’ll be better than yours.” Luke, who’s 6 feet, 3 inches tall, is more interested in acting than basketball, but he doesn’t get a part in the school play. Jax recruits Luke as a player in exchange for taking part in a theater competition with him. Eventually, the team members connect with intelligent, precocious, and lonely classmate Miley, who wants to improve her sports statistics skills: Helping the team improve their play would give her great college application material. The story is told through Jax’s, Luke’s, and Miley’s alternating first-person points of view. Miley’s entries appear as doodle-filled graphic journal entries. Full of drama, miscalculations, and turnovers, this story explores a fun scenario in which a bunch of kids with different interests and skills work together for a common purpose. Unfortunately, the innocent fun is undermined by racialized portrayals of two teammates in the otherwise largely white-presenting cast. Nic is cued Black, and his father is in jail, while teammate Koa, who’s cued Pasifika, is repeatedly described in an othering way that references his “bush of curly hair” and the nickname “Animal” (from his old school); he’s also “been through some stuff” that’s similar to Nic’s trauma.

A heartfelt mix of basketball, theater, math, and friendship that’s marred by stereotypical representation. (Fiction. 8-12)

Pub Date: April 1, 2025

ISBN: 9781639933839

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Shadow Mountain

Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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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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BECAUSE OF MR. TERUPT

During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)

Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010

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