A wonderful narrative for readers who love baseball that also offers valuable lessons to those who don’t.
In Derr’s illustrated middle-grade novella, a boy must learn how to become a leader.
Eleven-year-old Luis is close friends with the kids on his coed baseball team, the McIntyre Manatees—but that hasn’t always been the case. In this book, he and his friends relive what happened when they first met a year ago, when Luis moved to Ohio from Texas. His parents encouraged him to join the local baseball team to ground him in familiar habits after the upheaval of a big move. He was new to the well-established Manatees and was shocked when the new coach picked him to be captain over kids who’d been on the team longer, and his teammates were similarly surprised. Only soft-spoken catcher Gary seemed to be on his side when he took up his position, and the hardest player to get along with was first baseman Jimmie, the biggest, strongest, and meanest kid on the team. As Luis and his teammates played through the season, they realized that winning games isn’t just about skill—it’s also about being able to work together. Readers follow Luis as he learns leadership skills in a smooth, well-paced narrative that models good communication and perseverance. They’ll find themselves rooting for the Manatees as the story builds and playoffs approach. A major letdown, though, is that Derr has players recounting playoff highlights after the fact rather than allowing readers to experience the game as it occurs. He also frames the novel as the story of Luis and Jimmie’s learning to become friends, which feels discordant at the end, when greater emphasis is on Luis’ growth as team captain. However, these aspects don’t spoil the joy of the story or the portrayal of the characters’ clear love for sports, which are evident in the text and grayscale line drawings by LaCoste, which are cartoonlike and expressive; characters are depicted with an array of skin tones.
A wonderful narrative for readers who love baseball that also offers valuable lessons to those who don’t.Pub Date: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781643712840
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Red Chair Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.
In Florence’s middle-grade fantasy novel, a young girl’s heart is tested in the face of an evil, spreading Darkness.
Eleven-year-old Lydia, “freckle-cheeked and round-eyed, with hair the color of pine bark and fair skin,” is struggling with the knowledge that she has reached the age to apprentice as an herbalist. Lydia is reluctant to leave her beloved, magical Mulberry Glen and her cozy Housetree in the woods—she’ll miss Garder, the Glen’s respected philosopher; her fairy guardian Pit; her human friend Livy; and even the mischievous part-elf, part-imp, part-human twins Zale and Zamilla. But the twins go missing after hearing of a soul-sapping Darkness that has swallowed a forest and is creeping into minds and engulfing entire towns. They have secretly left to find a rare fruit that, it is said, will stop the Darkness if thrown into the heart of the mountain that rises out of the lethal forest. Lydia follows, determined to find the twins before they, too, fall victim to the Darkness. During her journey, accompanied by new friends, she gradually realizes that she herself has a dangerous role to play in the quest to stop the Darkness. In this well-crafted fantasy, Florence skillfully equates the physical manifestation of Darkness with the feelings of insecurity and powerlessness that Lydia first struggles with when thinking of leaving the Glen. Such negative thoughts grow more intrusive the closer she and her friends come to the Darkness—and to Lydia’s ultimate, powerfully rendered test of character, which leads to a satisfyingly realistic, not quite happily-ever-after ending. Highlights include a delightfully haunting, reality-shifting library and a deft sprinkling of Latin throughout the text; Pit’s pet name for Lydia is mea flosculus (“my little flower”). Fine-lined ink drawings introducing each chapter add a pleasing visual element to this well-grounded fairy tale.
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781956393095
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Waxwing Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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