An unevenly written, message-heavy story of sports and friendship.
Young softball players get lessons in sportsmanship in the third book in Brotherton’s (Margie Makes A Difference, 2017, etc.) middle-grade series.
This latest installment about the adventures of the Lady Tigers under-14 softball team follows the story of third baseman Nicole Carter. She loves everything about the team until an aggressive, ambitious new player, Diana Shumaker, shows up at practice. Diana’s family moved to town so that Diana could play in a more challenging league, and her competitive nature—and that of her mother, a former softball player—is evident from her first practice. Her attempts to show up the other players quickly erode team morale (“The friendly banter that was so common at the Lady Tigers’s practices was absent as the girls went through the throwing motions with a sort of dreary rhythm”), and matters come to a head when the Tigers play the Rockets, a team known for their poor sportsmanship. The Tigers’ coaches are aware of Diana’s bad influence, but Nicole continues to try to be friends with the new girl, hoping that their shared love of the sport will triumph over their individual ambitions. Brotherton has a solid grasp of softball mechanics, and the book has no shortage of ballplaying scenes that will capture athletic readers’ imaginations (“The runner conducted a beautiful slide-by, her feet sliding behind the bag to avoid the tag as she reached back with her arm to make contact”). At the same time, however, the prose is frequently simple and repetitive (“ ‘Good thing it was only a dream,’ Tammy said. ‘Thanks. Now I don’t feel so silly about my bunt dream,’ Nicole said”). There’s also little subtlety in the book’s determined moralizing: “Nicole marveled at the difference between the sportsmanship between this game and the last one against the Rockets. This was the softball she enjoyed the most.” That said, this book will still appeal to many young readers looking for action-oriented sports stories.
An unevenly written, message-heavy story of sports and friendship.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
