A wacky story of loyalty and self-discovery.
Charles is 12, unpopular, bullied, small and geeky—and to make matters worse, he’s turning into a giant reptile.
Charles relates, with wit and pathos, his Kafka-esque metamorphosis from angst-ridden pubescent to dinosaur. As his skin turns green and a tail sprouts, Charles is utterly dismayed, “Forget about being popular. At this point I would happily settle for human.” His two best friends, Lucille and Sam, also outcasts, seem rather thrilled at Charles’ change. He grapples with the difficulties of being a huge reptile, finding clothing and sitting at a desk problematic. Bizarrely, though, not only can he still talk, he still has his own voice. At school, despite continued bullying from his nemesis, Craig, Charles begins to enjoy celebrity status, and Amy, the most popular girl in the school, starts fussing over him. Charles gets utterly swept up in this new sensation and in so doing loses perspective on where his loyalties lie. When he’s challenged to betray his best friends, Charles faces the monster inside himself. With occasional comic drawings and lots of humor regarding life as a dinosaur among humans (such as the scale of reptile farts), this romp is a balm for anyone who’s ever felt awkward in their own scales err, skin. Charles’ first-person narration reveals an anthropologist’s eye for the social strata of middle school.
A wacky story of loyalty and self-discovery. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-01271-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Offers a hauntingly truthful view of secrets and strength.
A tale of survival, friendship, and the strength that comes from overcoming fears.
Middle schooler Jac is dealing with the fallout of a real-life nightmare: childhood cancer. But it’s not just the fear of recurrence that she has to handle, but the reality of surviving and carrying the burden of her mom’s constant worry. When Jac discovers a large house that wasn’t there before looming at the end of a street in her suburban New Jersey neighborhood, she worries it’s a hallucination, which could mean a recurrence of her illness. But after her best friend, a boy named Hazel, sees the house too, her sense of adventure takes over. Provoked by a couple of bullies who dare them to enter and then follow them inside, Jac and Hazel explore the house and are met with surprises—like a key with Jac’s likeness on it—that suggest her connection to this strange and terrifying place is personal. Before long, the kids realize they are trapped inside. Shocks follow with every new door they open as they search for an exit and discover ever increasing frights. Delightfully nightmarish visions chase Jac, offering the feel of a thrilling game with twisted and terrifying imagery, as she navigates the house, seeking to understand her connection to this unusual place in this emotionally resonant story. Characters seem to default to White.
Offers a hauntingly truthful view of secrets and strength. (Paranormal. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-313657-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Tenderly resonant and memorable.
Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.
Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century small-town setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.
Tenderly resonant and memorable. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231052
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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