A superbly rendered love letter to identity and heritage.
We Need Diverse Books co-founder Oh follows up Flying Lessons & Other Stories (2017) with a collection of 12 interwoven, slice-of-life tales from acclaimed middle-grade authors.
In an unnamed American city stands a (potentially haunted) yellow apartment building called the Entrada, where aromas of food and loud sounds set the tone for a summer of communal living. Desirée, apparently of West Indian descent, helps Ro perform a lion dance for her Chinese school. Yaniel learns about his abuela’s history in Cuba while contemplating his feelings for Filipina American Pacy, a Star Trek aficionado with a crush on him. Many kids are first- or second-generation immigrants, and their cultures intermingle in authentic ways. Angel’s family is late on the rent, and his parents’ memories of their home city, Sephardic-founded Monterrey, Mexico, leads them to feel confident reaching out to their white Jewish landlords for help. Vietnamese American Hao discovers the ghost he’s been seeing around the building has a connection to Mr. Joe, the Italian American barber. Though each story was written by a different author—among them Tracey Baptiste, Adam Gidwitz, and Erin Entrada Kelly—they nevertheless coalesce into a rich depiction of a loving community. With candor and sensitivity, the authors take on both lighthearted issues such as burgeoning romance as well as more serious ones, including bigotry and the harsh realities of the American dream.
A superbly rendered love letter to identity and heritage. (foreword by Meg Medina) (Anthology. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780593648445
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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