by Claire Swinarski ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2021
Illuminating.
Kate is changing for better, worse, and everything in between.
Seventh grade is starting, and Kate’s mom has moved away, leaving her with her dad. She has been growing apart from former bestie Haddie, a nonconformist who doesn’t feel like a good fit for Kate anymore. Popular mean girl Taylor, who befriends Kate, may not be the best fit, either. But Kate is—mostly—happy to be in Taylor’s orbit, where she doesn’t have to talk about her situation the way she would with Haddie, who is genuinely interested in her life. Kate even follows along when Taylor’s clique harasses Haddie, resulting in Haddie’s fall through the ice on a frozen pond. Narrated by Kate, the scene and her ugly, conflicting emotions are vividly described. Instinct kicks in, and Kate saves Haddie. Video of the rescue makes national media, and celebrities dub her Kate the Great. Is she? Tensions mount, and Kate anxiously treads water until her full role in the incident is exposed, forcing her to confront Haddie, Taylor, her mother, and herself. Kate must decide who she is: bully, hero, friend, foe, beloved daughter, dependent, all of the above. Characters are three-dimensional and realistically flawed, as Kate becomes increasingly aware. The resolution feels familiar but Kate’s solution is unique; she won’t be defined by one moment. This messy middle-school drama shines a light on what it means to develop identity. Main characters read as White.
Illuminating. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-291270-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019
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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by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney
by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney
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by E.B. White illustrated by Garth Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1952
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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