Thirteen-year-old Matt, from a large, noisy, loving family, faces the cancer of his beloved 19-year-old brother Tom. But this is also a baseball story, and Zinnen writes about baseball, as she does about families and illness, with astonishing and lyrical precision. Matt and his mom are housesitting near the hospital where Tom is having last-ditch radiation; his father and the gaggle of younger children are at home. Matt left his middle-school team, where he’s a hero of sorts in both batting and fielding, and is enlisted by his new school, a sorry fourth place in the league. Zinnen does not prettify Tom’s desperate straits or his family’s reaction when he sneaks out of the hospital to marry his girlfriend. Nor does she gloss over Matt’s emotional struggles with a new school, a new team, and the insistent drumbeat of Tom’s deterioration. A note of hope, and sunlight, at the end will satisfy readers, who should be sure to keep the hankies handy. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-525-47163-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A sixth-grader and an inexperienced teacher both learn something from each other in Clements’s newest teachable-moment-driven school tale. Hart Evans has always, and effortlessly, been Cool—a talent that backfires when his control-freak music teacher, Mr. Meinert, throws up his hands and leaves it to the unruly school chorus to elect its own director for the upcoming Holiday Concert. Hart surprises both Mr. Meinert and himself by rising brilliantly to the occasion. Clements stirs a few side issues into the pot—for one, Meinert and the other arts teachers are being laid off on January first—but his focus being Hart’s introduction to group dynamics and the management thereof, complications of plot or character cause only minor ripples. Having learned the value of listening, of running things democratically, and of knowing when to seek help, Hart and Meinert engineer a quirky, rousing triumph—that, no, doesn’t save Meinert’s job, but does leave everyone involved, readers included, with both good feelings and the idea that both young people and adults are sometimes guilty of underestimating each other. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-689-84516-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
Who is next in the ocean food chain? Pallotta has a surprising answer in this picture book glimpse of one curious boy. Danny, fascinated by plankton, takes his dory and rows out into the ocean, where he sees shrimp eating those plankton, fish sand eels eating shrimp, mackerel eating fish sand eels, bluefish chasing mackerel, tuna after bluefish, and killer whales after tuna. When an enormous humpbacked whale arrives on the scene, Danny’s dory tips over and he has to swim for a large rock or become—he worries’someone’s lunch. Surreal acrylic illustrations in vivid blues and red extend the story of a small boy, a small boat, and a vast ocean, in which the laws of the food chain are paramount. That the boy has been bathtub-bound during this entire imaginative foray doesn’t diminish the suspense, and the facts Pallotta presents are solidly researched. A charming fish tale about the one—the boy—that got away. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88106-075-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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