A poignant and powerful tale of resilience.
A seventh grade gun violence survivor reckons with PTSD in this carefully rendered story about the fragility and power of human connection.
Questions of “what if” cascade into a burden that feels too heavy for 13-year-old Stevie Jane Cohen-Kaplan, whose brain feels “broken” in the aftermath of a tragedy. A shooting at a summer festival in her New Jersey town has left her mom hospitalized. Given the large local Jewish population, was this a hate crime? Trapped in her grandparents’ Manhattan apartment and unprepared to visit her mother, who’s unconscious, Stevie Jane struggles to find coping mechanisms and relies on distractions to keep herself going. Seeking respite, she relies on Raisin, her emotional-support-dog-in-training, and her best friend, Avi. The friends begin piecing together the stories of those around Stevie Jane, from a neighbor’s life after surviving the Holocaust, to episodes in her grandfather’s life and her own mother’s activist history. Each revelation leads them around the city, contributing to Stevie Jane’s budding confidence; over time, she finds more and more pieces of her mother’s past. Centering on a Jewish family, the story hints at Manhattan’s diversity through some descriptions of minor characters. The realistic portrayal of trauma is handled with deft sensitivity, from physical symptoms to therapeutic intervention. Interspersed poems add texture and vibrancy, weaving the delicate threads of the characters’ lives into a buoyant tale of hope.
A poignant and powerful tale of resilience. (content warning, author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9780316570978
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
A successful call for creating and imagining, even if the story itself falls short.
In the dystopian, totalitarian world of 2099, 14-year-old Tessa and her family are desperate to solve the mystery of her twin brother Theo’s disappearance.
Tessa is growing up in a time when playgrounds are historical relics, surveillance cameras are everywhere, music is outlawed, and owning books is illegal. Under the absolute rule of Zokiris, the decadeslong leader of her territory, people are heavily controlled. When Theo vanishes under mysterious circumstances and his name is erased from the Territory Statistics list, Tessa’s 135-year-old neighbor, Miriam, gives the family contraband books that become central to figuring out Theo’s whereabouts. Most books have long since been seized and stored away in Building 903; Tessa is intrigued by their presence in her home, while her mother is terrified. Lowry, the acclaimed, award-winning author of The Giver (1993), shines in her creation of uncomfortably believable dystopian societies. Tessa’s painfully limited world is fully imagined, with its own history, laws, and norms. Her relationship with her brother reads as realistic and tender and is crucial to the mystery. Miriam is the most strongly developed character: wise and independent, unafraid and hopeful. While the climb to the book’s climax is captivating, the hurried resolution is disappointing. The powerful messaging around the importance of literature and imagination certainly resonates, however. The main characters present white.
A successful call for creating and imagining, even if the story itself falls short. (Dystopian. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780063515109
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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