Four short stories, each illustrated by a different artist and each containing an unobtrusive but centrally important moral. In "Inviting Jason" Stanley, a typically conformist ten-year-old, fears that his birthday party will be ruined when his mother makes him invite the dud whose salient trait appears to be his well-known dyslexia. When Dick, the popular boy Stanley wants to impress, takes up with Jason largely because of the novelty of his spelling and drawing, Stanley is chagrined anew. In "The Night of the Leonids" Lewis and his grandmother go to Central Park for a star shower, only to find that a cloudy sky has spoiled the show. When he complains that he won't have another such chance for thirty-three years, Lewis is reminded of what that much time means to his sixty-three-year-old grandmother. Clara in "Camp Fat" is encouraged by a sympathetic "night counsellor," but discovers upon leaving that Miss Natasha has been dead for years. "Momma at the Pearly Gates" is told by a black girl about her mother's fourth-grade encounter with racial prejudice in the person of one Roseann Dolores Sansevino, whom Momma wins over after an amusing series of instills and challenges. Neither as lively nor as imaginative as Mrs. Konigsburg's full-length fiction, the stories share her offhand humor and her perceptive empathy with a child's point of view. The theme or lesson of each story emerges naturally from the characters and events and adds in its turn an ironic note to the plot's conclusion.
Pub Date: April 22, 1971
ISBN: 1416955011
Page Count: 37
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1971
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A charming friendship story and great setup for future books.
Curious about the Big Wide World outside his Sasquatch community, Hugo makes a friend who is of it.
Sasquatch Hugo’s bedroom is inside a cave and possesses the charming feature of a small stream running through it that he can sail his little toy boat on. It’s cool, but he yearns to see the Big Wide World. When he asks his smart friend Gigi if a Sasquatch might become a sailor, she says it’s possible but would be difficult—the primary rule of their people is to not be seen by Humans. Then, in everyone’s favorite Hide and Go Sneak class, which is held outside, a Human appears; Hugo laughs at the sight, drawing Human attention in a taboo-breaking mistake. Shortly after, Hugo’s toy boat floats into the cave with a Human toy—soon, it’s facilitating a pen-pal–type relationship that’s derailed when Hugo confesses to being a Sasquatch and Human Boone, a budding cryptozoologist, doesn’t believe him. How Hugo and Boone resolve this misapprehension and become friends in a joint search for the Ogopogo concludes this series opener. Potter keeps the third-person narrative tightly focused on Hugo’s perspective, and the details she uses to flesh out the Sasquatch world are delightfully playful. Sala’s drawings depict a homey Sasquatch cavern community, Boone as a freckled, white boy, and Hugo as a hairily benevolent behemoth.
A charming friendship story and great setup for future books. (final art unseen) (Fantasy. 5-9)Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2859-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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