Fleming wields a light touch with the story’s pacing and a steady hand for hard reality in this tender portrait of a boy...
Life can be rough when your dad is at war. Derek knows.
Fifth grade is hard enough without landing in the principal’s office. It gets even harder when his best childhood friend becomes his chief tormentor. It was Budgie’s mom who found him at the bus stop one rainy morning and told him it was a Saturday, and the nickname “Saturday Boy” clings, along with every other classroom embarrassment. He just can’t seem to keep his head down. But Derek is armed with 91 letters from his dad. He knows just the one to pull out when he’s mad or sad or just missing his superhero sidekick. Debut author Fleming deftly balances the building tension of the wartime absence of Derek’s supportive father against the trials of being bullied at school. Through Derek’s first-person narration, readers are drawn to the likable boy, who reveals the tension caused by anxiety for a parent’s safety. To escape his troubles at school, Derek imagines heroic adventures with his dad and misses the clues to developments at home. While he is surrounded by loving and understanding adults, the focal point of his peer interactions is Budgie, who plays a large role in unmasking the pressures of a family living with the sacrifices of war.
Fleming wields a light touch with the story’s pacing and a steady hand for hard reality in this tender portrait of a boy under stress. (Fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: June 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-78551-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Exciting skating action and easy-to-relate-to issues but too much going on in too little space.
In the second volume of a Canadian trilogy, 12-year-old skateboarder Cale Finch makes a skate video with the Seven Stair Crew, of which he is newly a member.
When the story opens, Cale has just “ollied the Seven Stairs,” earning his place among the older boys who make up the Seven Stair Crew. He lives with his single mom, has a crush on classmate Angie Phillips and is afraid of Tweeze, a skateboarding bully from the next town over. Then the Seven Stairs Crew decides to put together a video of their best tricks, and a local skateboarding hero volunteers his help...and some information about Cale’s family history. There are a lot of storylines for such a short book, and none of them is explored especially thoroughly. Shooting the video is frustrating, but the frustration seems to resolve itself. The boys sneak out to film late at night, so that no one can kick them out of the best skating spots in town, and take uncomfortable risks with firecrackers, but an accident happens to a character largely unrelated to their late-night activities (and, unsettlingly, footage of a crew member throwing firecrackers at a drunk interloper is positively received when the film premieres).
Exciting skating action and easy-to-relate-to issues but too much going on in too little space. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4594-0521-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: James Lorimer
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
So does this tedious effort to climb aboard the bandwagon.
A phoned-in Diary of a Wimpy Kid wannabe from a Mad Magazine and Daily Show writer.
Based on a blog of the same name that runs in Mad, the narrative is framed as nearly daily entries over the course of a calendar year by a middle-school Seinfeld. The content is entirely predictable. He skates on or over the edge of embarrassment while trying to be noticed by girls, generally comes out second best in dealings with his gifted little sister and briefly lands a summer job wearing a hot-dog suit. He joins several of his classmates in making a (wait for it) science-project volcano and records many similarly unexceptional experiences and encounters. These entries are thickly padded with a monotonous litany of callow opinions on dozens of cultural markers from various commercial mascots (including Ronald McDonald) to TV shows (Jeopardy, for example) and movies (Jurassic Park, among many others). These share space with complaints about minor annoyances like gum in water-fountain drains and superficially clever ruminations about why “werewolves” aren’t called “arewolves,” the nature of Santa’s reindeer games and like burning topics. Moreover, he decides that his school mascot, movies about volcanoes, work and a mind-numbing catalog of other irritations all “suck.”
So does this tedious effort to climb aboard the bandwagon. (line drawings, mood icons) (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-193436-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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