A moving, hopeful tale about confronting depression.
Suffering from depression, a girl erases words from a magical dictionary, hoping in the process to also erase her sadness.
Zia, a sixth grader with a gift for making up words, lived happily with her mother until Shadoom came into her life a year ago. Shadoom is Zia’s name for the “room of shadows” now filling her with “fear and hurt and sadness.” Afraid everyone will think she’s a “hopeless weirdling,” Zia stops hanging out with her best friends, hides in the girls’ bathroom at lunch, and refuses to tell her mother, who’s stressed enough working two jobs, paying bills, and caring for Zia’s grouchy Greek immigrant grandmother who has dementia. Zia wants to fix herself, but she doesn’t know what’s wrong. Discovering her grandmother’s mysterious dictionary that comes with a charmed eraser, Zia experiments with erasing words and feels empowered as they vanish from the world. While removing words that trigger Shadoom, Zia erases fear and then pain with dire consequences and must find a way to undo her actions. Narrating in the first-person present tense, Zia’s honest voice adds immediacy and credibility to her chronicle of the frightening onset of her depression, her lonely efforts to conceal it, her totally misguided attempts to magically erase it, and the realization she doesn’t have to cope on her own. Definitions of words key to Zia’s story introduce each chapter, reinforcing the dictionary theme.
A moving, hopeful tale about confronting depression. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35099-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions.
An isolated class of misfits and a teacher on the edge of retirement are paired together for a year of (supposed) failure.
Zachary Kermit, a 55-year-old teacher, has been haunted for the last 27 years by a student cheating scandal that has earned him the derision of his colleagues and killed his teaching spirit. So when he is assigned to teach the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class—a dumping ground for “the Unteachables,” students with “behavior issues, learning problems, juvenile delinquents”—he is unfazed, as he is only a year away from early retirement. His relationship with his seven students—diverse in temperament, circumstance, and ability—will be one of “uncomfortable roommates” until June. But when Mr. Kermit unexpectedly stands up for a student, the kids of SCS-8 notice his sense of “justice and fairness.” Mr. Kermit finds he may even care a little about them, and they start to care back in their own way, turning a corner and bringing along a few ghosts from Mr. Kermit’s past. Writing in the alternating voices of Mr. Kermit, most of his students, and two administrators, Korman spins a narrative of redemption and belief in exceeding self-expectations. Naming conventions indicate characters of different ethnic backgrounds, but the book subscribes to a white default. The two students who do not narrate may be students of color, and their characterizations subtly—though arguably inadequately—demonstrate the danger of preconceptions.
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256388-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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