bookshelf

WHERE I’D LIKE TO BE

Name: WHERE I’D LIKE TO BE
Author: Frances O’Roark Dowell
ISBN: 0-689-84420-4

by Frances O’Roark Dowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2003

bookshelf

An orphaned girl creates, with friends, a remarkable shelter that allows them to dream of a permanent home. Maddie has resigned herself to life in the East Tennessee Children’s Home, figuring that “there wasn’t much chance anyone was going to adopt an 11-year-old girl as plain-Jane as me.” She keeps her hopes up by cutting out photographs of houses and pasting them in her Book of Houses in anticipation of a house of her own. When the charismatic, opinionated, and secretive Murphy arrives at the Home, Maddie determines to be her friend. In short order, their group expands to include Donita and Ricky Ray, two other children from the Home, and Logan, the lonely and misfit son of a local judge; together they decide to build a fort in Logan’s backyard. With a fair degree of help and luck, they build a solid little fort, within which they dream and tell stories of their homes and families, past, imagined, and hoped-for. Dowell (Dovey Coe, 2000) has created a tremendously appealing heroine and a parcel of equally agreeable secondary characters. Their stories, individual and collective, are poignantly told without ever becoming maudlin, and the way these lonely children come together to make their own home and family is truly lovely. When Murphy’s yearning for a place outside of their little society causes a jealous Maddie to threaten it altogether, readers will find themselves hoping as hard as Maddie that it will all come right in the end. The talky, pie-in-the-sky resolution mars the tightness of the narrative that precedes it, but taken as a whole, this is a lovely, quietly bittersweet tale of friendship and family. (Fiction. 10-14)

Pub Date: April 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-689-84420-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW TO BUILD A STORY…OR, THE BIG WHAT IF
by Frances O’Roark Dowell ; illustrated by Stacy Ebert

- BOOK REVIEW
SAM THE MAN & THE RUTABAGA PLAN
by Frances O’Roark Dowell ; illustrated by Amy June Bates

- BOOK REVIEW
SAM THE MAN & THE CHICKEN PLAN
by Frances O’Roark Dowell ; illustrated by Amy June Bates

bookshelf

SEE YOU IN THE COSMOS

by Jack Cheng ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2017

Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious.

bookshelf

If you made a recording to be heard by the aliens who found the iPod, what would you record?

For 11-year-old Alex Petroski, it's easy. He records everything. He records the story of how he travels to New Mexico to a rocket festival with his dog, Carl Sagan, and his rocket. He records finding out that a man with the same name and birthday as his dead father has an address in Las Vegas. He records eating at Johnny Rockets for the first time with his new friends, who are giving him a ride to find his dead father (who might not be dead!), and losing Carl Sagan in the wilds of Las Vegas, and discovering he has a half sister. He even records his own awful accident. Cheng delivers a sweet, soulful debut novel with a brilliant, refreshing structure. His characters manage to come alive through the “transcript” of Alex’s iPod recording, an odd medium that sounds like it would be confusing but really works. Taking inspiration from the Voyager Golden Record released to space in 1977, Alex, who explains he has “light brown skin,” records all the important moments of a journey that takes him from a family of two to a family of plenty.

Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious. (Fiction. 10-14)

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-18637-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Dial Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S FAMILY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MANY MASKS OF ANDY ZHOU
by Jack Cheng ; illustrated by Jack Cheng

bookshelf

THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL

From the School for Good and Evil series , Vol. 1

by Soman Chainani ; illustrated by Iacopo Bruno ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2013

Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.

bookshelf

Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.

Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).

Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)