Realistic and sympathetic, with an appealing protagonist and an interesting hobby for texture.
Middle schooler Ella Cohen navigates life with divorced parents.
Two years ago, Ella’s mother married Krishnan, who lets Ella show his champion dog, Elvis. Ella is close to her stepfather and is happy to share this hobby with him, but she feels pangs of guilt when she thinks of her own father, David, who cannot deign to be in the same room as his ex-wife’s new husband. Ella wishes she could share this hobby—and her debut at the National Dog Show in Philadelphia—with her entire family. Conjecturing that if her father had a partner he would be happy and confident around Krishnan and, therefore, would attend the dog show, Ella and her friends set up a fake online-dating profile for her father, and all sorts of hijinks ensue. By the end of this delightful and satisfying novel, Ella gets her comeuppance—she is caught in a barrage of lies and must apologize to her mother, her father, Krishnan, and Beth (a woman whom her father inadvertently falls for). Ultimately, Ella learns she can’t control all possible outcomes to create the best of all possible worlds. Cherry presents a realistic portrait of a multicultural, blended family—Ella, her mother, and her father are white and Jewish, and Krishnan is South Asian—and doesn’t blunt the challenges of divorce.
Realistic and sympathetic, with an appealing protagonist and an interesting hobby for texture. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5344-1212-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit...
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
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
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