A quick-paced, goofy delight.
It’s time for the fifth-grade field trip to the Minks Mystery Mansion, the home of Liberty Falls’ eccentric founder, famous for his thousands of inventions.
The tour of the mansion, which is full of zany surprises, gets derailed by an unexpected snow storm. This group is stranded overnight—the perfect opportunity to explore the strange house for the legendary lost inventions, said to be worth a fortune! The story is narrated through short chapters that offer shifting perspectives from several characters, each of whom grapples with a hidden challenge. Aaron, multiracial, is the son of an army sergeant, so the family moves frequently and he never quite feels like he fits in. Jessie, Chinese-American, is lonely when her best friend stays home sick. Eddie, white and a descendant of Minks, feels pressure to help his family save their home from foreclosure. Chloe, implied white, begins to recognize that her best friend is actually the class bully. The four protagonists come together over the course of their shared overnight adventure and help one another learn lessons of leadership, courage, and trust. Oddball adults, pun-filled wordplay, and the founder’s obsessive pickling habit keep the tone lighthearted and humorous even as the kids face mild bullying and a potential robbery.
A quick-paced, goofy delight. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-11691-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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