Middle-grade readers will enjoy this book with its hints of magic, well-limned characters, and that totally appealing...
The oddball star of this engaging fantasy slowly comes to believe her unusual character and strange powers come from her distant relationship to Mother Goose.
Pixie Piper knows that the other girls have multiple friends where she has only one friend, and that pal is a boy, Gray. The redheaded white girl is an avid reader and writer of poetry, yet another oddity in her town. After Pixie’s mother reveals that they are both descendants of Mother Goose (which explains her incredible facility at impromptu rhymed verse), events take off. Pixie and Gray find a large egg and incubate it to hatching. Pixie’s maternal love for the baby goose she names Destiny—a charismatic character in her own right—precipitates the arrival of Raveneece, a strange, scary female villain, into her life. Over the course of the story, Alexa and Lucy (of South African and Chinese descent, respectively, giving the story some racial diversity) become new friends and popular Sage, a sort of “frenemy.” Her small town, where everyone seems to know everyone else, is a comfortable setting. The Piper family lives in Acorn House, in a development that also houses a museum for historic toilets. Characters, even the secondary ones, are memorable and add much to the story. The climax will chill readers but satisfy them, and there is a strong hint that more books will follow—here’s hoping that’s soon.
Middle-grade readers will enjoy this book with its hints of magic, well-limned characters, and that totally appealing gosling. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239377-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions.
An isolated class of misfits and a teacher on the edge of retirement are paired together for a year of (supposed) failure.
Zachary Kermit, a 55-year-old teacher, has been haunted for the last 27 years by a student cheating scandal that has earned him the derision of his colleagues and killed his teaching spirit. So when he is assigned to teach the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class—a dumping ground for “the Unteachables,” students with “behavior issues, learning problems, juvenile delinquents”—he is unfazed, as he is only a year away from early retirement. His relationship with his seven students—diverse in temperament, circumstance, and ability—will be one of “uncomfortable roommates” until June. But when Mr. Kermit unexpectedly stands up for a student, the kids of SCS-8 notice his sense of “justice and fairness.” Mr. Kermit finds he may even care a little about them, and they start to care back in their own way, turning a corner and bringing along a few ghosts from Mr. Kermit’s past. Writing in the alternating voices of Mr. Kermit, most of his students, and two administrators, Korman spins a narrative of redemption and belief in exceeding self-expectations. Naming conventions indicate characters of different ethnic backgrounds, but the book subscribes to a white default. The two students who do not narrate may be students of color, and their characterizations subtly—though arguably inadequately—demonstrate the danger of preconceptions.
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256388-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit...
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
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