A sweet middle school episode that celebrates the friendship gained from working together.
At the crossroads of preteen and teen, Wylie faces the strain of growing up.
Wylie and her longtime best friend, Jada, have loved boy-band heartthrob Colby Cash for years. Now that Colby Cash is hosting the television vocal competition show Non-Instrumental, Wylie can hardly wait for the new season to begin. Jada, however, is less enthusiastic, the first sign, as they begin seventh grade, that there are some growing pains ahead. Jada, prone to melodrama, spreads her wings and gets a part in the school musical. Feeling abandoned, Wylie creates a bond with a new friend, Libby, who encourages her to get over her stage fright and join her in starting an a cappella group in order to win a video call with Cash. Busy nursing her feelings of estrangement, narrator Wylie also bemoans having to spend weekends with her father and his new family. Tensions flair when jealousy compels Jada to create a competing singing group, thus incentivizing the flow of creative juices. With the help of a mentoring teacher, the young teens raise their voices and learn to harmonize, traversing the tricky landscape of hurt feelings and maturation. Although she shares her name with a black actress and has long, black hair and dark eyes, Jada’s identity is unexplored, while Wylie and Libby are white; the cast seems solidly middle-class in this kind, mild-mannered drama.
A sweet middle school episode that celebrates the friendship gained from working together. (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7157-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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