An exuberant, rousing celebration of youth activism.
A 12-year-old girl claims her place in a turbulent world.
After years of being silenced at school, Mexican American Celina is ready for a clean start. It’s not easy starting middle school in a new town, and now her dad has been deported yet again. While she, her mother, and Gramma trust her papacito will find a way to return, as he has before, his absence is always painful. Still, Celi makes one friend, then two more, and the four middle schoolers quickly find refuge and strength in each other. The friendships become lifelines over the course of the year as they face ordinary middle school challenges—homework, mean kids—and broader social turmoil with the emerging Covid-19 pandemic, the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, increasing awareness of global warming, and more. Tafolla skillfully weaves these significant recent historic moments and the hopeful stories of leaders like Emma Tenayuca and César Chávez together with the more specific experiences of the four friends as Celina is racially profiled by a teacher and a Covid death hits close to home. The friends, who are Chicano, are distinct enough, but a few are more thinly drawn; protagonist Celi, an emerging poet, is consistently and vividly rendered, though, and her righteous, powerful, and joyful voice carries the day.
An exuberant, rousing celebration of youth activism. (author’s note, land acknowledgement) (Verse fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593354711
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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