Aimed equally at boys and girls, this engaging comedy offers some life lessons with a giggle.
When a fed-up teacher unexpectedly resigns, her unruly fifth-grade class decides not to tell anyone.
Woodrow’s agile classroom comedy has much in common with the kind of sports story during which the bumbling players come together to win the big game. Similarly, this novel is about a group of disparate children who learn how to cooperate as a team, making friends and honing their talents to achieve victory. The story is narrated in alternating first-person voices by five classmates: Kyle, the bully; Samantha, the critical rich-girl fashionista; Eric, the so-quiet-he’s-practically-invisible writer/wallflower; Maggie, the bossy brain; and Adam, the well-meaning kid who is always in trouble. The children think their teacher’s absence will be a blast, but there are many problems to solve, the most challenging being the creation, rehearsal, and performance of an original play about the American Revolution for after-school activity night. The play, a comic set piece that neatly caps the action, is this book’s big game, and besides being funny and delightful, it showcases the group’s new grasp of teamwork and also demonstrates how each child has grown individually. The story is a little slow to get going, and inexperienced readers may find it difficult to distinguish among the narrative voices, but the premise can’t miss.
Aimed equally at boys and girls, this engaging comedy offers some life lessons with a giggle. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-80071-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
SEEN & HEARD
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