A potentially useful resource for kids struggling with loss, change, and letting go.
Maggie, 12, protects herself from loss and change by hoarding; it’s not going well.
Maggie dates her anxiety from the day her nana, suffering from dementia, failed to recognize her. Now that her parents are fostering an infant destined for adoption, Maggie dreads the day they must give little Izzie up. Maggie saves both traditional mementos and detritus (rocks, candy wrappers, used milk cartons) as aides memoire, insurance against forgetting. She’s upset when her dad, who coaches the all-girl trapshooting team she loves, brings in a boy. Kind, intelligent Maggie, who attaches easily, finds change and letting go a struggle. Her school locker and hidden boxes hold an increasingly out-of-control collection. Her uncharacteristic fury when her boxes are discovered prompts her parents to seek professional help for her with a cognitive behavioral therapist. Supported by family and friends, Maggie charts her progress in letting go. Despite challenges, this white, middle-class, Jewish family is exemplary. Her busy working parents always have time for Maggie; her brothers—teenage Dillon and Charlie, 6—are remarkably understanding. The writing is lucid and intelligent, but theme, syntax, and vocabulary—though not page count—seem crafted for the younger edge of the target range, and Maggie herself reads younger than 12. Pediatric hoarding, like adoption and fostering, is portrayed sensitively, but this challenging condition (causes, comorbidities, and uncertain prognosis) may be harder to resolve than suggested.
A potentially useful resource for kids struggling with loss, change, and letting go. (author’s note, playlist, psychologist’s note, experts consulted) (Fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-30821-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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
A fine emotional stretch within reach of the intended audience.
When siblings Jessie and Evan (The Lemonade War, 2007, and The Lemonade Crime, 2011) accompany their mother on the time-honored midwinter holiday visit to their grandmother’s home in the mountains, the changes are alarming.
Fire damage to the house and Grandma’s inability to recognize Evan are as disquieting as the disappearance of the iron bell, hung long ago by their grandmother on Lowell Hill and traditionally rung at the New Year. Davies keeps a tight focus on the children: Points of view switch between Evan, with his empathetic and emotional approach to understanding his world, and Jessie, for whom routine is essential and change a puzzle to be worked out. When Grandma ventures out into the snow just before twilight, it is Evan who realizes the danger and manages to find a way to rescue her. Jessie, determined to solve the mystery of the missing bell, enlists the help of Grandma's young neighbor Maxwell, with his unusual habitual gestures and his surprising ability to solve jigsaw puzzles. She is unprepared, however, for the terror of seeing the neighbor boys preparing a mechanical torture device to tear a live frog to pieces. Each of the siblings brings a personal resilience and heroism to the resolution.
A fine emotional stretch within reach of the intended audience. (Fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-56737-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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