Roxanne's exhilaration as she faces seventh grade is tempered only by her penchant for worry. While her number one homegirl, Maxine, is off to a private school on scholarship, Roxanne and others from their Bronx housing project go to public school in nearby Riverdale. Roxanne does win new friends, but keeps trying to nail down which behavior is ``cool'' and which isn't: whether to break her mother's rules about guests in order to keep the interest of an eighth-grade boy; whether to cut class for a party as the other girls in her ``group'' do. This time out, Wilkinson (Ludell, 1975, etc.) slips issues of race and economic stereotyping into well-worked territory. Familiar school-story trappings are made fresh by the setting (housing projects are all but ignored by YA writers, with the exception of Walter Dean Myers), and by an appealing, pell-mell narration peppered with exclamations marks that further hasten the pace. Readers who haven't gotten the point by the last paragraph will find somewhat clunky clarification there. Nevertheless, Roxanne's honesty and zeal, the affectionate bumbling of her longtime friend Rolland, and a liberal dose of contemporary slang make for an easy, timely slide through the first days of junior high. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-590-46186-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Paulsen recalls personal experiences that he incorporated into Hatchet (1987) and its three sequels, from savage attacks by moose and mosquitoes to watching helplessly as a heart-attack victim dies. As usual, his real adventures are every bit as vivid and hair-raising as those in his fiction, and he relates them with relish—discoursing on “The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition,” for instance: “Something that you would never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.” Specific examples follow, to prove that he knows whereof he writes. The author adds incidents from his Iditarod races, describes how he made, then learned to hunt with, bow and arrow, then closes with methods of cooking outdoors sans pots or pans. It’s a patchwork, but an entertaining one, and as likely to win him new fans as to answer questions from his old ones. (Autobiography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32650-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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