An accessible introduction to the importance of the freedom to read.
Seventh-grader June Harper sets up a secret lending library when her school decides to ban books.
When June’s overprotective father finds a school library copy of a book called The Makings of a Witch, her parents put pressure on the school to place Ms. Bradshaw, the school librarian, on administrative leave and, in addition to emptying June’s home library, to strip the school library of anything deemed inappropriate. “Students in possession of unapproved texts will face disciplinary action,” reads the board resolution, and teachers will be fired. As a rule-follower, June is conflicted, but she can’t help feeling that this is wrong. Compounding her confusion are her reciprocated crush on eighth-grader Graham, who asks her to lie low and choose between him and books, and her best friend, Emma, who sympathizes with Graham. When June finds a Little Free Library in her neighborhood, she is inspired to create a contraband lending library in an abandoned locker. This quickly grows into a movement, if only users can keep it a secret. Varnes’ debut is a straightforward advocacy book for children’s right to make their own reading choices. Most characters default white except for brown-skinned implied Latina Abby Rodriguez. June’s narration is sometimes clumsy, and some characters, such as June’s parents, are thinly developed and come across as extreme. The ending, however, is realistically open-ended.
An accessible introduction to the importance of the freedom to read. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-7147-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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