When Willis Merrill’s pet raccoon jumps on her back and Willis knocks her down, sixth-grader Lydia Carson knows she wants nothing to do with him. Worse, he’s her new next-door neighbor. However, his older brother Elliott is different. To gain Elliot’s friendship, Lydia begins to give Willis the necessary “special handling.” Reading to him in her favorite tree house fills the empty hours of her summer vacation—those that aren’t filled with new household chores when the Nanna who raised her decides to take an extended vacation. “Sometimes folks just need a helping hand,” Nanna had said, about the ways she helped their new neighbors. Moreover, her absence seems to help Lydia’s family, too. Nevertheless, while relationships in the Carson family are improving, the Merrill family is falling apart. Willis’s father’s drunken rage when he discovers his wife is working results in an incarceration that allows the rest of them to leave, to make a new life somewhere else. Woodworth convincingly describes life in small town Indiana in 1962, the changing relationships between mother and adolescent daughter, and the complicated ways in which families survive and thrive, in this hopeful debut. (Fiction. 8-11)
Pub Date: March 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-34677-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
Despite its lackluster execution, this story’s simple premise and basic vocabulary make it suitable for younger readers...
From the author of the Animorphs series comes this earnest novel in verse about an orphaned Sudanese war refugee with a passion for cows, who has resettled in Minnesota with relatives.
Arriving in winter, Kek spots a cow that reminds him of his father’s herd, a familiar sight in an alien world. Later he returns with Hannah, a friendly foster child, and talks the cow’s owner into hiring him to look after it. When the owner plans to sell the cow, Kek becomes despondent. Full of wide-eyed amazement and unalloyed enthusiasm for all things American, Kek is a generic—bordering on insulting—stereotype. His tribe, culture and language are never identified; personal details, such as appearance and age, are vague or omitted. Lacking the quirks and foibles that bring characters to life, Kek seems more a composite of traits designed to instruct readers than an engaging individual in his own right.
Despite its lackluster execution, this story’s simple premise and basic vocabulary make it suitable for younger readers interested in the plight of war refugees. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36765-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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
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