Fans of quiet, nostalgic stories about team spirit should enjoy this debut effort.
A rambling girl learns the meaning of home.
Home-schooled Derby Christmas Clark, 11, lives and travels year-round with her jovial single dad and 7-year-old brother in their Rambler RV. Every summer the white family returns to the same rural Virginia town, where, outside the run-down baseball stadium, the family sells hamburgers and fries to fans of the local minor league team. Having made this stop for years, the Clarks know the town and its citizens well. Derby is especially close to African-American Marcus, seemingly her age, and grandmotherly June, the box-office manager, also African-American. This particular summer brings unhappy news. Derby resolves to fix problems and effect change with the aid of family and friends; in the process, she uncovers some long-untold secrets. The plot unfolds over the course of two weeks in an unspecified year in June, and Derby recounts events and her thoughts in first person. Her simile-laden voice is genial and humorous, but her aphorisms and epiphanies about herself and others often seem too grown-up and self-aware. While Derby’s well-realized, other characters are drawn more superficially; some seem like stock types. Interpersonal relationships and the novel’s nostalgic sensibility evoke a cozy feel. The unoriginal plot—kid discovers family and home are wherever she is and galvanizes a whole town into helping a beloved neighbor—is satisfying, as is the pat happy ending.
Fans of quiet, nostalgic stories about team spirit should enjoy this debut effort. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-60201-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
A solid debut: fluent, funny and eminently sequel-worthy.
Inventively tweaking a popular premise, Jensen pits two Incredibles-style families with superpowers against each other—until a new challenge rises to unite them.
The Johnsons invariably spit at the mere mention of their hated rivals, the Baileys. Likewise, all Baileys habitually shake their fists when referring to the Johnsons. Having long looked forward to getting a superpower so that he too can battle his clan’s nemeses, Rafter Bailey is devastated when, instead of being able to fly or something else cool, he acquires the “power” to strike a match on soft polyester. But when hated classmate Juanita Johnson turns up newly endowed with a similarly bogus power and, against all family tradition, they compare notes, it becomes clear that something fishy is going on. Both families regard themselves as the heroes and their rivals as the villains. Someone has been inciting them to fight each other. Worse yet, that someone has apparently developed a device that turns real superpowers into silly ones. Teaching themselves on the fly how to get past their prejudice and work together, Rafter, his little brother, Benny, and Juanita follow a well-laid-out chain of clues and deductions to the climactic discovery of a third, genuinely nefarious family, the Joneses, and a fiendishly clever scheme to dispose of all the Baileys and Johnsons at once. Can they carry the day?
A solid debut: fluent, funny and eminently sequel-worthy. (Adventure. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-220961-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The magic of reading is given a refreshingly real twist.
This is the way Pearl’s world ends: not with a bang but with a scream.
Pearl Moran was born in the Lancaster Avenue branch library and considers it more her home than the apartment she shares with her mother, the circulation librarian. When the head of the library’s beloved statue of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay is found to be missing, Pearl’s scream brings the entire neighborhood running. Thus ensues an enchanting plunge into the underbelly of a failing library and a city brimful of secrets. With the help of friends old, uncertainly developing, and new, Pearl must spin story after compelling story in hopes of saving what she loves most. Indeed, that love—of libraries, of books, and most of all of stories—suffuses the entire narrative. Literary references are peppered throughout (clarified with somewhat superfluous footnotes) in addition to a variety of tangential sidebars (the identity of whose writer becomes delightfully clear later on). Pearl is an odd but genuine narrator, possessed of a complex and emotional inner voice warring with a stridently stubborn outer one. An array of endearing supporting characters, coupled with a plot both grounded in stressful reality and uplifted by urban fantasy, lend the story its charm. Both the neighborhood and the library staff are robustly diverse. Pearl herself is biracial; her “long-gone father” was black and her mother is white. Bagley’s spot illustrations both reinforce this and add gentle humor.
The magic of reading is given a refreshingly real twist. (reading list) (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6952-1
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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