This funny, if flawed, baseball-infused tale highlights the challenges of adapting to puberty and sudden disability at the...
Last April Noah was a Little League catcher on a strong team—five months and one devastating car accident later, the seventh-grader’s fatherless, bitter, and sidelined in a wheelchair.
How do you relate to the teachers and kids who saw you as an athlete now that your spinal cord injury prevents you from controlling basic bodily functions? Former rival Logan, the coach’s son and team’s ace pitcher, now ridicules Noah. Only his friendship with Alyssa remains unchanged until new student Dee-Dub (short for Double-Wide) arrives. It’s refreshing to hang with someone who knows him only post-accident, though Dee-Dub has issues; he’s exceptionally bright but has a hard time with social cues (he presents as if he’s on the spectrum, but no diagnosis is mentioned). Noah’s resistance to physical therapy worries his mom. Her friendship with snarky fourth-grader Makayla’s dad upsets Noah. Wise adults, including a neighbor estranged from his own children, and wise kids like Dynamo, a younger PT patient, help Noah move from “mascot” to active participant in life. (The book hints at ethnic markers in names and hairstyles but otherwise adheres to the white default.) The surfeit of plotlines and themes prevents in-depth treatment, and superprecocious Makayla and Dynamo are unconvincing, but droll, sympathetic Noah keeps it real. His dilemma is universal: the struggle to rebuild identity when what once defined us no longer exists.
This funny, if flawed, baseball-infused tale highlights the challenges of adapting to puberty and sudden disability at the same time. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-283562-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power.
Will 12-year-old Nura be able to outsmart the trickster jinn and save herself and her friends?
Nura lives in the fictional Pakistani town of Meerabagh, where she has worked mining mica to help support her family of five—her mother, herself, and her three younger siblings—since her father’s death. In the mines she has the company of her best friend, Faisal, who is teased by other kids for his stutter, and she enjoys small pleasures like splurging on gulab jamun. Although Maa wants Nura to stop working and attend school, she has no interest in classroom learning and hopes to save up to send her younger siblings to school instead so they can break the family’s cycle of poverty. Following a mining accident in which Faisal and others are lost in the rubble, Nura goes to the rescue. In her quest, she is plunged into the magical, glittering jinn realm, where nothing is as it seems. The author seamlessly weaves into the worldbuilding of the story commentary on real-life problems such as the ravages of child labor and systems that perpetuate inequities. An informative author’s note further explores present-day global cycles of oppression as well as the life-changing power of education. This action-packed story set in a Muslim community moves at a fast pace, with evocative writing that brings the fantasy world to life and lyrical imagery to describe emotions.
An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5795-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Sweetly magical.
Seven-year-old Grace knows a great many words, but she can’t bring herself to string them together on paper.
In her eyes, this gift is unique to her writer aunt, Lily, with whom she spends her afternoons. Lily, however, has found herself bereft of ideas, and out of desperation she puts out an ad for a writing assistant. Enter Rex: a dog whose apparent oddities cleverly conceal a magic that, while unexplained, is quietly remarkable. Rex inspires Lily almost immediately, and the two find happiness in their new partnership. Similarly, Rex inspires Grace to turn her words into stories. Her reservations will feel familiar to any fledgling pen-pusher: not knowing how to write what she feels, how to start, or how to press on. Those reservations extend into her everyday life, as it fills and changes in ways she never foresaw, but her small network—loving (if busy and often absent) parents, the wondrous Rex, Lily and her writing group, the encouraging teacher Ms. Luce, and steadfast, unflappable Daniel, Grace’s best friend—remains by her side throughout her writer’s journey. MacLachlan spins from simple words an enigmatic, gentle, but perhaps too succinct tale. While Grace’s first-person narration doesn’t quite ring true to her young age, (a lack of contractions makes the prose oddly formal), charmingly scratchy pencil sketches scattered throughout mitigate this alienating effect. The only physical descriptions to be found are attached to the animal characters.
Sweetly magical. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294098-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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