A sweet, heartfelt story about friendship and family.
Big secrets, best friends, and pitch-perfect characters drive this funny, touching story.
Shy, book-loving Sydney Frankel wants to spend her last summer before middle school lying around reading and hanging out with her best friend, Maggie. But Sydney’s mother wants her to be confident and ready for the big transition; she makes her sign up for a summer course at the community center instead. Making it worse, her mom won’t even let her take the one course she is interested in—the one about books. Maggie, on the other hand, is signed up for the reading course but would prefer to take dance. The girls hatch a plan to cleverly solve both their problems by switching identities, in the process creating a raft of mishaps, chaos, and opportunities to grow. Will the friends have what it takes to keep their deception going? It’s hard to pretend to be someone you aren’t when you are still trying to figure out who you are in the first place. Sydney must also navigate her feelings about her mother’s pregnancy, adding some urgency to her need for independence and creating the conditions for the girls’ madcap plan for coping with their summer disappointments. The book’s treatment of the complexities of tweendom are pitch perfect: the need for autonomy, the intensity of friendships, crushes, and the messy process of growing up. Main characters are White and Jewish.
A sweet, heartfelt story about friendship and family. (Fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5415-9862-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Kar-Ben
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Certain to elicit both gales of giggles and winces of sympathy (not to mention recognition) from young readers.
First volume of a planned three, this edited version of an ongoing online serial records a middle-school everykid’s triumphs and (more often) tribulations through the course of a school year.
Largely through his own fault, mishaps seem to plague Greg at every turn, from the minor freak-outs of finding himself permanently seated in class between two pierced stoners and then being saddled with his mom for a substitute teacher, to being forced to wrestle in gym with a weird classmate who has invited him to view his “secret freckle.” Presented in a mix of legible “hand-lettered” text and lots of simple cartoon illustrations with the punch lines often in dialogue balloons, Greg’s escapades, unwavering self-interest and sardonic commentary are a hoot and a half.
Certain to elicit both gales of giggles and winces of sympathy (not to mention recognition) from young readers. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8109-9313-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
The journey is even gently funny—Omakayas’s brother spends much of the year with a porcupine on his head. Charming and...
This third entry in the Birchbark House series takes Omakayas and her family west from their home on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, away from land the U.S. government has claimed.
Difficulties abound; the unknown landscape is fraught with danger, and they are nearing hostile Bwaanag territory. Omakayas’s family is not only close, but growing: The travelers adopt two young chimookoman (white) orphans along the way. When treachery leaves them starving and alone in a northern Minnesota winter, it will take all of their abilities and love to survive. The heartwarming account of Omakayas’s year of travel explores her changing family relationships and culminates in her first moon, the onset of puberty. It would be understandable if this darkest-yet entry in Erdrich’s response to the Little House books were touched by bitterness, yet this gladdening story details Omakayas’s coming-of-age with appealing optimism.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-029787-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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