The entire collection brims with humor, pathos, and the heroic struggle to grow up.
In each of 10 stories, kids reentering the neighborhood from their school day reveal their unique narratives.
BFFs T.J. and Jasmine find their yearslong friendship getting them through parental separation, illness, and foster care. A group of four, all children of cancer survivors, has been brought together by a school counselor. A female skateboarder is the target of a bully—to the relief of his usual victim. A teen with the signs of OCD meets a street musician who changes her outlook. Two ardent gamers are caught up in the confusion of sexual questioning, and there’s an odd couple of friends whose difference in size is no barrier to their bond. A teen with a fear of dogs devises an elaborate plan to get past his neighbor’s new pet, and the class clown tries to find a way to make her overworked mother laugh. Three boys work to make their friend presentable enough to tell a classmate that he likes her. An accident sustained by the school crossing guard causes her son significant anxiety. There are connections among some of the stories: places, people, incidents. However, each story has its own center, and readers learn a great deal about each character in just a few lines. Reynolds’ gift for capturing the voices and humanity of urban teens is on full display. The cast adheres to a black default.
The entire collection brims with humor, pathos, and the heroic struggle to grow up. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-3828-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Groups considering mounting productions that go beyond the popular musicals may want to consider looking at this uneven but...
Newly created plays for young people are not published very often, so this collection merits some attention.
The four dramas, commissioned by the well-respected Minneapolis Children’s Theater Company, are about growing up in ethnically diverse communities, but the plays cover different sets of problems for their young protagonists. Esperanza Rising, loosely adapted from the novel by Pam Muñoz Ryan, is set during the Depression, when Mexican immigrants competed with Okies for agricultural jobs in California. Esperanza changes from a pampered rich girl into a hard worker. The others are very contemporary. In Average Family, a reality-TV contest brings the wealthy Minneapolis Roubidoux family back to a Native American lifestyle they have never known. Also set in Minneapolis, the strongest play (at least on the page), Snapshot Silhouette, features a resilient Somali refugee, Najma, who finds both her voice and a new friend when she moves in with a well-meaning African American mother and her disaffected daughter; they are struggling as a family after the murder of an older daughter. Sasha, an isolated child of a Russian immigrant, finally gets to know her neighbors when she goes looking for a pen to write a research paper on the eponymous Brooklyn Bridge, the most artificial selection.
Groups considering mounting productions that go beyond the popular musicals may want to consider looking at this uneven but thought-provoking anthology. (Drama. 11-14)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8166-7313-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
An entertaining romp, even without the raunchy bits.
A faithful (if relatively clean) version of the world’s oldest surviving complete novel, written “for librarians, teachers, scholars, and extremely intelligent children,” according to the afterword.
Usher (Wise Guy: The Life and Philosophy of Socrates, 2005) frames his adaptation as a tale within a tale in which the author meets two travelers on the road. He listens as one describes how he was transformed into an ass by reckless use of a stolen magical ointment, is mistreated in turn by robbers, “eunuch priests” (homosexual con men, in the original) and other rough handlers—then transformed at long last into a human boy by the goddess Isis. Though all of the sex and most of the dissolute behavior has been excised, the lad’s first transformation is milked throughout for double entendres—“Oh no!” gasps a witness. “You’ve made an ass of yourself!”—and there are plenty of silly incidents and names (silly in Latin, anyway, like a dopey Centurion dubbed Decius Verissimus Stultus) to lighten the overall tone. Motley’s elaborate illustrated initials and pen-and-ink drawings add satiric bite (“Eat roses from my bosom,” intones Isis mystically, floating over awed worshipers like a divine Vanna White) and further comic elements. So thoroughly reworked that even the original’s most famous imbedded story, “Cupid and Psyche,” is relegated to an appendix, this nonetheless conveys a clear sense of Apuleius’ plot, language and major themes.
An entertaining romp, even without the raunchy bits. (afterword) (Classic. 11-14)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56792-418-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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