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
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
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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