One for smart, outspoken kids looking for their places in the world.
Ida, 14, leaves her rural Colorado mountain ranch home for Steamboat Springs in this stand-alone companion to 2001’s The Secret School.
Ida Bidson attended a one-room schoolhouse, but in September 1925, she says goodbye to her family. She won’t be home for two months. Ida dreams of being a teacher, so she must go 20 miles away to high school. Kind county school inspector Miss Sedgewick lets Ida board with her for free, and everything feels so modern: indoor plumbing, electricity, and a telephone! Ida’s anxious to please but wrestles with what’s considered proper and what other people think of her. When she makes some friends, they form the Secret Sisters club to try new things and help each other in school. But the girls end up on the bad side of the principal, who has firm attitudes about ladylike behavior, women voters, and the capability of rural students and threatens to expel them. Getting good grades on the upcoming midterm exams is critical. While maintaining a solid grounding in the 1920s, the novel tackles self-discovery amid challenging situations, including dealing with peer pressure, misogyny, classism, and general unfairness, in ways contemporary readers will find accessible and relatable. Historical facts are memorably and organically conveyed through Ida’s innate curiosity. Characters read White; one of Ida’s friends is from an immigrant mining community, and her name cues as having East European heritage.
One for smart, outspoken kids looking for their places in the world. (author’s note, glossary, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780358248088
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
Poignant and heartwarming.
Zephyrina the cat, the “Robin Hood of felines,” rescues discarded toys so they can have new lives.
Zephyrina brings toys back to the apartment she shares with Elizaveta and her daughter, Dasha, refugees from war-torn Ukraine. Dasha reconditions Zephyrina’s rescues and sets them outside for three days, just in case they have owners who want to reclaim them. Afterward, they join the other toys in the parlor—the Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasured. Dasha and Elizaveta don’t know that the toys are sentient. At midnight they abandon their rigid daytime postures to cavort and play, overseen by their leader, Pocket, a tiny mascot bear made to comfort soldiers during World War I. One night, Zephyrina brings back a dirty old bear, and Pocket is astounded. The new arrival, Berwon, might come from a lost shipment of the first-ever stuffed bears, sent from Germany to the U.S. in 1903—and if so, he’s worth a fortune. In the ensuing antics, the unpleasant villain Picky Vicky covets Berwon, and a kind museum curator does, too, but for different reasons. Applegate’s writing is exquisitely nuanced; she couches profound themes in accessible language that depicts relatable situations. Gentle, generous Elizaveta and Dasha poignantly underscore the human impact of wars. Santoso’s enchanting, delicate, black-and-white illustrations bring the timeless feeling of a classic to this hopeful, humanizing story of the distressed looking out for each other.
Poignant and heartwarming. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781250904362
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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