Frequent summer campers are the ones most likely to run this effort up the flagpole.
How to balance the tantalizing promise of popularity against supporting your needy very best friend? That’s the choice Izzy faces at her new, mostly white summer camp.
Best friend Mackenzie keeps offering clues that Izzy’s headed down the wrong path, but the 12-year-old is tone-deaf to the hints that the new “friends” she’s bonding with are shallow and unkind. The inseparable twosome’s BFF relationship devolves into an oddball situation with Mackenzie secretly—then reluctantly—providing Izzy with ideas for pranks to play against a cabin of rival male campers, which Izzy attributes to her fictitious older brother, invented to boost her credibility. Her notable lack of understanding of Mackenzie’s position, related in her dismissive first-person voice, both makes her an unpleasant character and may leave readers wondering why her friend ever liked her. It’s a situation poised, inevitably, to collapse into a messy disaster. Although Izzy eventually, uncharacteristically, recognizes her mistakes, it’s hard to ignore her previous behavior, leaving the expected satisfying conclusion feeling a bit flat and insincere, with only Mackenzie’s emerging spirit seeming fully believable. Brown-skinned Izzy is biracial, with a Latino dad and a white mom, and her cabin mates include an Indian-American girl, an Asian girl, and another dark-skinned girl, but the novel’s default is white.
Frequent summer campers are the ones most likely to run this effort up the flagpole. (Fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6354-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Cinematic, over-the-top decadence, a tense race against time, and lessons on what’s truly valuable.
A reward of $5,000,000 almost ruins everything for two seventh graders.
On a class trip to New York City, Felix and Benji find a wallet belonging to social media billionaire Laura Friendly. Benji, a well-off, chaotic kid with learning disabilities, swipes $20 from the wallet before they send it back to its owner. Felix, a poor, shy, rule-follower, reluctantly consents. So when Laura Friendly herself arrives to give them a reward for the returned wallet, she’s annoyed. To teach her larcenous helpers a lesson, Laura offers them a deal: a $20,000 college scholarship or slightly over $5 million cash—but with strings attached. The boys must spend all the money in 30 days, with legal stipulations preventing them from giving anything away, investing, or telling anyone about it. The glorious windfall quickly grows to become a chore and then a torment as the boys appear increasingly selfish and irresponsible to the adults in their lives. They rent luxury cars, hire a (wonderful) philosophy undergrad as a chauffeur, take their families to Disney World, and spend thousands on in-app game purchases. Yet, surrounded by hedonistically described piles of loot and filthy lucre, the boys long for simpler fundamentals. The absorbing spending spree reads like a fun family film, gleefully stuffed with the very opulence it warns against. Major characters are White.
Cinematic, over-the-top decadence, a tense race against time, and lessons on what’s truly valuable. (mathematical explanations) (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-17525-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Problem-solving through perseverance and friendship is the real win in this deeply smart and inspiring story.
Leaving Brooklyn behind, Black math-whiz and puzzle lover Bree starts a new life in Florida, where she’ll be tossed into the deep end in more ways than one. Keeping her head above water may be the trickiest puzzle yet.
While her dad is busy working and training in IT, Bree struggles at first to settle into Enith Brigitha Middle School, largely due to the school’s preoccupation with swimming—from the accomplishments of its namesake, a Black Olympian from Curaçao, to its near victory at the state swimming championships. But Bree can’t swim. To illustrate her anxiety around this fact, the graphic novel’s bright colors give way to gray thought bubbles with thick, darkened outlines expressing Bree’s deepest fears and doubts. This poignant visual crowds some panels just as anxious feelings can crowd the thoughts of otherwise star students like Bree. Ultimately, learning to swim turns out to be easy enough with the help of a kind older neighbor—a Black woman with a competitive swimming past of her own as well as a rich and bittersweet understanding of Black Americans’ relationship with swimming—who explains to Bree how racist obstacles of the past can become collective anxiety in the present. To her surprise, Bree, with her newfound water skills, eventually finds herself on the school’s swim team, navigating competition, her anxiety, and new, meaningful relationships.
Problem-solving through perseverance and friendship is the real win in this deeply smart and inspiring story. (Graphic fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-305677-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperAlley
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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