Punchy, electric, and smart social commentary.
This spirited coming-of-age story brings menstruation and period equity to the fore.
When mischievous and self-involved eighth graders Helen and Gracie’s big end-of-middle-school prank backfires, their fed-up principal delivers a surprisingly restorative punishment: “I am sentencing you to care.” The two BFFs have the month before summer break to “accomplish something that matters to the school.” Helen and Gracie join the Community Action Club, whose members are working to have free menstrual products available in every school bathroom. The chapters, alternately told from Helen’s and Gracie’s first-person points of view, depict their growth out of codependency and toward independence and empathy as their commitment, understanding, and care for the project increase. Secondary characters, including a villainous school board member, sympathetic family members, cliquey classmates, and swoony crushes, are entertainingly portrayed. The dialogue is quick-moving and hilarious, but the pun-filled jokes can verge on corny and repetitive. There are reflections on family, gender, and social class, but there’s less emphasis on racial equity (Gracie and Helen are cued white). When the project goals are in crisis, and the club members really need to be heard, the girls’ previous antics cause others to doubt them and their motivations. This is when they candidly learn lessons about allyship, strategy, disappointment, and the complex decision-making processes and compromises that can accompany collective action.
Punchy, electric, and smart social commentary. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781338835830
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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