The Gang of Five wants, basically, to get through seventh grade in Paintbrush Falls, New York. The four of them (there are only four, actually) have been friends forever: Bobby’s fat; Addie’s too tall and too smart; Skeezie has personal hygiene issues; and Joe has known he was gay almost since he was born. It’s Bobby’s sweet, sharp voice that narrates—how Addie’s refusal to say the Pledge of Allegiance in class leads to their all running for school office, how each of them develops their first crush, and how both play out in utterly recognizable 12-year-old ways. Howe (Color of Absence, p. 941, etc.) lets his kids discover how the names we call each other shape our vision of ourselves, and the Gang’s attempt to bring about a no-name-calling day (no Dweeb, Fluff, Twinkie, or Nerdette) rings true and real. Straight narrative alternates with transcripts of the Gang’s meetings at the local ice cream parlor down to every last word, thanks to Addie’s determined style. Bobby may be preternaturally articulate, but he is also winsome and funny about some very painful issues: the loss of a parent; the weirdness of adults, even nice ones; the pressure of hormones; and the importance of friendship. Readers of every stripe will find themselves here and laugh (or cringe) as they catch on. (Fiction. 10+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83955-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
Unapologetic and unflinching: a critical read.
Through honest and powerful vignettes, Jewell’s latest stitches together a collective memoir of formative experiences of educational racism and American schooling by people of the global majority.
Anchored by the author’s narrative of navigating school as a “light-skinned Black biracial cis-female” in a working-class neighborhood of a city in New York state, the work incorporates both her experiences of being labeled and othered in school as well as the first-person experiences of people of various ages, ethnicities, races, and genders, who write about how they navigated and were affected by systemic racism in their K-12, college, and postgraduate educations. The contributors include well-known authors of young people’s literature including Joanna Ho, Minh Lê, and Randy Ribay; writers and educators such as Lorena and Roberto Germán, Torrey Maldonado, and Gayatri Sethi; and two entries by teens from Portland, Oregon. Alongside stories of segregation, mistreatment by white educators, hypervisibility, surveillance, stereotyping, pigeonholing, and exclusion, this collection asks readers to “envision what freedom in schools might be.” These bold tales of truth telling are interspersed with historical facts, definitions, and anti-racist pedagogy that emphasize and contextualize the reality that, while experiences of racism in educational systems evolve with each generation, one constant is that schools are microcosms of larger systems of inequality and institutional oppression in the world beyond classroom walls.
Unapologetic and unflinching: a critical read. (resources, recommended reading, references, about the contributors) (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780358638315
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Versify/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world.
Sent to stay with octogenarian relatives for the summer, 14-year-old Mike ends up coordinating a community drive to raise $40,000 for the adoption of a Romanian orphan. He’ll never be his dad's kind of engineer, but he learns he’s great at human engineering.
Mike’s math learning disability is matched by his widower father's lack of social competence; the Giant Genius can’t even reliably remember his son’s name. Like many of the folks the boy comes to know in Do Over, Penn.—his great-uncle Poppy silent in his chair, the multiply pierced-and-tattooed Gladys from the bank and “a homeless guy” who calls himself Past—Mike feels like a failure. But in spite of his own lack of confidence, he provides the kick start they need to cope with their losses and contribute to the campaign. Using the Internet (especially YouTube), Mike makes use of town talents and his own webpage design skills and entrepreneurial imagination. Math-definition chapter headings (Compatible Numbers, Zero Property, Tessellations) turn out to apply well to human actions in this well-paced, first-person narrative. Erskine described Asperger’s syndrome from the inside in Mockingbird (2010). Here, it’s a likely cause for the rift between father and son touchingly mended at the novel's cinematic conclusion.
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: June 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25505-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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