Smart, insightful, poignant—leavening brutal, middle school realities with wry humor.
An inventive seventh grade fixer discovers the downside of solving others’ problems.
Since their mother left their family, over a year ago, narrator Gladys, 12, and her sisters—popular Mabel, 16, and brainy Agnes, 9—have longed for her return. Their hardworking lawyer dad can’t replace what’s missing. Glad discovered her problem-solving skills three years earlier, when their mom needed an excuse for forgetting Agnes at school. Now, Glad regularly finds excuses for Mabel and provides desperate classmates with cover stories. She helps one sustain belief in a fictitious Canadian boyfriend; makes up excuses for another to miss band practice; and assists a third in shedding the girly school apparel her grandma insists on for the T-shirts and jeans she prefers. Trustworthy, dependable Glad never extracts payment for her efforts. A few friends would be nice, yet popularity eludes her. Her only lunch-table companion remains grade-skipping “Harry Homework,” 10, who assists classmates with homework (André, the Anti-Bullying Aardvark notwithstanding) to avoid harassment. As Glad is asked to invent more-complicated fixes, school administrators are becoming suspicious. Planning for Mom’s promised visit presents another challenge: keeping Dad from dating until then. Ably assisted by a diverse cast of characters, Glad (who, like her family, is white) discovers that learning how to solve one's own problems is necessary to avoid making them again.
Smart, insightful, poignant—leavening brutal, middle school realities with wry humor. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-30810-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious.
If you made a recording to be heard by the aliens who found the iPod, what would you record?
For 11-year-old Alex Petroski, it's easy. He records everything. He records the story of how he travels to New Mexico to a rocket festival with his dog, Carl Sagan, and his rocket. He records finding out that a man with the same name and birthday as his dead father has an address in Las Vegas. He records eating at Johnny Rockets for the first time with his new friends, who are giving him a ride to find his dead father (who might not be dead!), and losing Carl Sagan in the wilds of Las Vegas, and discovering he has a half sister. He even records his own awful accident. Cheng delivers a sweet, soulful debut novel with a brilliant, refreshing structure. His characters manage to come alive through the “transcript” of Alex’s iPod recording, an odd medium that sounds like it would be confusing but really works. Taking inspiration from the Voyager Golden Record released to space in 1977, Alex, who explains he has “light brown skin,” records all the important moments of a journey that takes him from a family of two to a family of plenty.
Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18637-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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