A powerful depiction of the impact of climate change on a young activist’s mental health.
A young person learns how to turn eco-anxiety into action.
Seventh grader Haven has climate change anxiety. Symptoms include doomscrolling, nail-biting, nightmares, and difficulty concentrating. Afraid of being seen as overly sensitive and emotional, Haven keeps her fears private. One spring day, she has a panic attack and runs out of science class while watching a video of melting glaciers in Antarctica. Motivated by her anxiety, Haven starts talking about environmental issues with her friends, family, and teachers. When Haven and her classmates begin studying the local Belmont River, they discover the water is acidic. Haven rallies her community to advocate for an investigation into who’s polluting the river. What happened to the frogs? Is Gemba, the new glass factory that recently came to their town, involved in the contamination? Will Haven face her fears and speak out in public against climate change? Her desire to get to the bottom of the story is complicated by the fact that her father, who was unemployed for over two years, now works at Gemba, and the company is infusing money into the community. Dee explores the growing pains of a thoughtful and aware tween navigating everything from large-scale matters to jealousy to crushes. Her timely middle-grade novel is a sound character study with a conventional activism arc. Haven and her family are assumed White; the supporting cast is racially diverse.
A powerful depiction of the impact of climate change on a young activist’s mental health. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-8983-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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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