Longtime fans and new readers alike will devour this.
When 15-year-old healer Evie rejects her best friend’s marriage proposal in front of the fairy Lucinda, she unknowingly sets off a kingdomwide chain of events that will shape the course of Kyrrian history.
To punish Evie for rejecting an “exemplary” suitor, Lucinda transforms her into an ogre and decrees that she must accept a proposal within 62 days or remain an ogre forever. Ogres are hated and feared by Kyrrians: hairy, short-tempered, odoriferous, and magically persuasive, they eat humans and livestock with equal zeal. Hoping to learn persuasion in order to obtain a proposal, Evie joins a band of ogres and promptly falls for their human captive: a silver-tongued merchant named Peter. But will he propose? Though her time with the band is limited, her first-person narrative style meticulously notes her observations (“ogre hands are blink fast,” and “the ogre heart has a triple beat”). A chance encounter soon draws Evie back to human civilization. Even though she ministers to plague-stricken humans honorably, she faces suspicion and hostility, but she also gains loyal friends and learns valuable lessons about love. Levine references the Portuguese fairy tale “The False Prince and the True” and “Beauty and the Beast” to explore social prejudice, although Evie’s experiences as an ogre ultimately seem to reinforce how different she is more than they encourage solidarity. The book assumes a white default.
Longtime fans and new readers alike will devour this. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-256121-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Poignant and heartwarming.
Zephyrina the cat, the “Robin Hood of felines,” rescues discarded toys so they can have new lives.
Zephyrina brings toys back to the apartment she shares with Elizaveta and her daughter, Dasha, refugees from war-torn Ukraine. Dasha reconditions Zephyrina’s rescues and sets them outside for three days, just in case they have owners who want to reclaim them. Afterward, they join the other toys in the parlor—the Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasured. Dasha and Elizaveta don’t know that the toys are sentient. At midnight they abandon their rigid daytime postures to cavort and play, overseen by their leader, Pocket, a tiny mascot bear made to comfort soldiers during World War I. One night, Zephyrina brings back a dirty old bear, and Pocket is astounded. The new arrival, Berwon, might come from a lost shipment of the first-ever stuffed bears, sent from Germany to the U.S. in 1903—and if so, he’s worth a fortune. In the ensuing antics, the unpleasant villain Picky Vicky covets Berwon, and a kind museum curator does, too, but for different reasons. Applegate’s writing is exquisitely nuanced; she couches profound themes in accessible language that depicts relatable situations. Gentle, generous Elizaveta and Dasha poignantly underscore the human impact of wars. Santoso’s enchanting, delicate, black-and-white illustrations bring the timeless feeling of a classic to this hopeful, humanizing story of the distressed looking out for each other.
Poignant and heartwarming. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781250904362
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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