Hartley, floundering at home and school from a family trauma, finds a strange artistic postcard—and then another, and another.
Ever since Hartley’s older brother, Jackson, ran away, his parents are breaking down and his older sister’s become insufferable. Only baby brother George, a sweet and funny kid, seems to be thriving. In his discombobulated state of mind, how can Hartley come up with a topic for the big (extremely undirected and undersupervised) middle school final project? But amid Hartley’s eighth grade disorientation, he finds a quirky, collaged postcard. It bears a picture of fish and an offbeat, typewritten phrase, is numbered “1,” and is signed “g.o.” in the corner. Not long after, he finds a second postcard, equally quirky, numbered “2.” Thus begins Hartley’s quest to find all the postcards in the series as well as the artist, the mysterious g.o. Interwoven between some of Hartley’s chapters are interludes from the point of view of one Gretchen Oyster, a blue-haired, skateboarding high school girl with an artistic project. Despite choppy prose characterized by a plethora of one-sentence paragraphs and a setting that ranges from humorously absurd to simply implausible, the spare text and compelling illustrations of the postcards combine to make an appealing whole. Hartley’s white; Gretchen was adopted from China as a baby and is subject to racist and anti-adoption bullying.
A charmingly eccentric tale of briefly intersecting lives making meaning from art . (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-73526-621-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Tundra
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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BOOK REVIEW
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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