Plants aren’t the only things that grow in this book about perseverance, friendship, and personal growth.
Indian American fourth grader Nina Soni can’t believe her good luck: Unlike most years, this year, take-your-son-or-daughter-to-work day is sunny and bright and warm.
The beautiful weather means that Nina, her younger sister, Kavita, and her best friend, Jay, get to spend the day gardening with Nina’s landscape-architect mother. Nina, Kavita, Jay, and their families work together to build three raised beds, one for each of the children to use as their own first garden. Throughout the spring and summer, the kids help one another’s gardens thrive. This means finding ecofriendly, humane ways to fend off rabbits, blue jays, mosquitoes, and Japanese beetles. When their vegetables are ready, they share their successful harvests with their neighbors and a local food pantry. Through it all, Nina is determined to learn as much as she can so that she, like her mother, can become a master of the garden. As in previous books in this series, Nina’s sincere and circumspect narratorial voice—and her beautifully illustrated lists and asides—renders this story a delight to read. Sheth expertly weaves details about Nina’s Indian heritage together with her pride in being a Wisconsinite. However, unlike in previous volumes, the conflicts are largely unrelated to Nina’s personal relationships, and the plot meanders a bit, but not enough to deter either Nina’s fans or readers new to her world.
Plants aren’t the only things that grow in this book about perseverance, friendship, and personal growth. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68263-225-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
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
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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