Readers will find this look at social media habits eye-opening and accessible.
A middle schooler unintentionally becomes complicit in cyberbullying.
Seventh grader Faith already feels uncomfortable at school, caught between a former friend, Tierra, who knows about her coding skills, and her popular new friends, Janelle and Adria. Then SlamBook, a social media version of the old-fashioned comment book, goes viral, and Faith’s first-person narration, driven by dialogue, chronicles its dangerous effects. At first only a few classmates are targeted and the comments seem harmless. When the comments turn vicious, ranging from body-shaming to racist attacks against Adria’s Filipinx background, Faith uses her coding skills to identify the offenders. (Faith and her other friends seem to be white.) And when she discovers that her once-friendly classmates are posting scathing remarks about one another under the cover of anonymity, she feels compelled to post her own biting comments. It’s a deserved revenge, and no one will know, right? And it’s not really cyberbullying as a poster suggests—or is it? Faith’s wavering sense of her culpability is spot-on realistic, as is one student’s anonymous threat of suicide after too many attacks. While readers can glean many lessons about the perils of social media, Faris never crosses into preachy territory, grounding characters in the tough decisions facing young girls today. In addition to Adria, Faith’s Asian coding mentor, Ms. Wang, brings further racial diversity to the story and acts as a welcome female STEM role model.
Readers will find this look at social media habits eye-opening and accessible. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-4520-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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