A celebratory story of acceptance and creative expression.
At the theater camp of her dreams, an autistic 11-year-old is determined to be the star.
Maya can’t believe she’s going to attend musical theater day camp with “THE Irene Brown, legendary theater director.” And this summer, the camp will be putting on a performance of The Drowsy Chaperone, which is only Maya’s “favorite play of all time.” Obviously, Irene Brown will see that Maya is perfect for the starring role: She knows all the songs and everything about the show, and she even has a homemade shirt with The Drowsy Chaperone written on it. So why does Maya’s mother keep telling her not to take the starring role for granted? This is obviously just another one of her mother’s autism rules, like “Don’t chew on your hair” and “Don’t talk too much about musicals.” Maya’s even making new friends, but they get mad at her for no reason—she’s just trying to be helpful when she corrects their mistakes. She doesn’t want to always pretend to be “Maya in Public,” her most well-rehearsed role, but she does want to have friends. Can she be happily, obsessively perfectionist about theater and still be liked? Nuances and the messiness of growing up enrich Maya’s satisfying journey: Painfully, ultimately joyfully, she navigates the weirdness of friendships with neurotypical kids. Maya is white; Irene Brown is Black, and there’s racial diversity among the supporting characters.
A celebratory story of acceptance and creative expression. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781773218502
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
SEEN & HEARD
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