Sweet but uneven.
A girl with cerebral palsy finds herself in the spotlight.
A year after the events of Roll With It (2019), aspiring baker Ellie Cowan’s adventures resume just as her mom is marrying Hutch, her gym teacher. Unfortunately, while Mom and Hutch are honeymooning, Ellie will be stuck with her father, rowdy younger stepbrothers, and stepmother for a month. Her father feels like a stranger; he never knows how to act around her or her wheelchair. So when her outspoken best friend Coralee recruits Ellie and her other best friend, über-organized Bert, to help her compete in the Oklahoma Little Miss Boots and Bows pageant, Ellie welcomes the distraction. When Coralee begs Ellie to enter as well, Ellie acquiesces despite her distaste for pageants…and to spite her father, who thinks she can’t handle it. But when the pageant’s coordinator patronizingly fawns over Ellie, Coralee grows jealous. How can Ellie salvage their friendship? Despite some poignant moments and a realistically messy portrayal of family and friendship, this outing feels somewhat rushed. Readers scarcely have time to process some plot threads—including painful revelations—before Sumner wraps them up, and secondary characters, like fellow competitor Maya, feel somewhat underdeveloped. However, Bert remains endearing, and it’s heartening to see Ellie establishing boundaries with the occasionally overbearing Coralee. Ellie, her family, and most of her friends read White; Maya is Black.
Sweet but uneven. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781665918596
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
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