A worthy, timely, ambitious debut.
A careful introduction to consent and sexual harassment for a middle-grade audience.
Sammie Goldstein and David Fischer have been best friends since forever, but lately David has realized that he has a crush on Sammie, and he’s nervous about telling her. When Luke Sullivan, an extremely cool new kid, moves to New Roque, the New York City suburb where they live, David sees him as immediate competition. But all Sammie wants is to continue being friends with David, to keep her spot on the baseball team (she thinks that softball is for girls and that anything for girls must be inferior), and to avoid a romantic entanglement with the obnoxiously aggressive Luke. When David accidentally touches Sammie’s chest, their friendship begins to unravel fast, but Sammie discovers a newfound camaraderie with the girls she had always dismissed as being too, well, girly. Told in the rapidly alternating perspectives of the two white Jewish young people, the plot drags a bit in the middle as the two stumble painfully through constant failures to communicate; the antagonist, who embodies the worst of coercive male attitudes toward girls and women, is not given similar interiority or growth. These flaws aside, the middle grades need more books that address both the ways that misogyny and rape culture surface at that age and how it’s hard but necessary to get the help you need.
A worthy, timely, ambitious debut. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-288893-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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