by Gillian McDunn ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
McDunn’s tale of growing beyond a toxic childhood friendship will ring painfully true for many a reader. (Fiction. 8-12)
It’s tough to stand up to the queen.
Anxious Meg has always deferred to bold, popular Beatrix—knowing, unhappily, that Beatrix will quickly freeze her out if she doesn’t. Beatrix dictates what electives the two will share, what childhood traditions they will and won’t retain, and what Meg must do or say to retain her favor. When Meg is one of four seventh graders to be accepted into the competitive science elective, the very thought of telling Beatrix that they will no longer share dance brings unparalleled terror. However, it is eccentric, bee-obsessed new girl Hazel who relates that ill news at a more ill-fated neighborhood party, invoking Beatrix’s immediate animosity and Meg’s warring admiration and consternation. As Meg and Hazel begin to forge a connection through a science project featuring Hazel’s bees, Meg must find the courage to face down her failing friendship with Beatrix, her town’s (and her own) prejudices against the bees, and, ultimately, herself. Meg’s first-person narration is emotive and candid, maintaining sympathy even as her occasional hypocrisy provokes outrage. Middle school drama, including concerns regarding the legitimacy of its power, is tenderly treated, and the connections between characters—family, friends, classmates, and teachers—feel refreshingly genuine. The novel adheres to a white default, with some ethnic diversity among the supporting cast.
McDunn’s tale of growing beyond a toxic childhood friendship will ring painfully true for many a reader. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68119-751-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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by Kate DiCamillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
Tenderly resonant and memorable.
Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.
Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century small-town setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.
Tenderly resonant and memorable. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231052
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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by E.B. White illustrated by Garth Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1952
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
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