Readers with a hankering for a modern, Midwest animal tale could do worse.
Eleven-year-old Princess desperately wants a pet, but her father says animals on a farm must earn their keep.
With her dad away in Iraq, her mother busy with work and her older half-sister Monica busy being 16, “P” (which she prefers over Princess) tries to make the cow-herding dog Blackie a pet, but he won’t listen to her. When Blackie kills a possum, P finds it was a mother and adopts the surviving baby despite her father’s rule. With the help of her best friend Mart, P keeps “Ike” a secret from teachers and family while trying to teach him to be a wild possum (since her wounded father will be home soon). With rabies running rampant in the Oklahoma countryside and catastrophes coming fast and furious, can P do right by her charge and keep the farm ready for her father’s return? Blom’s debut is a run-of-the-mill wild-animal–as-pet tale, though the deployed-father element makes it plenty relevant today. There’s a slight disconnect between the vocabulary used to relate this folksy story and the first-person narrator’s difficulties in school and with letter writing, but P is a feisty, honest country gal.
Readers with a hankering for a modern, Midwest animal tale could do worse. (Fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2331-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
The journey is even gently funny—Omakayas’s brother spends much of the year with a porcupine on his head. Charming and...
This third entry in the Birchbark House series takes Omakayas and her family west from their home on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, away from land the U.S. government has claimed.
Difficulties abound; the unknown landscape is fraught with danger, and they are nearing hostile Bwaanag territory. Omakayas’s family is not only close, but growing: The travelers adopt two young chimookoman (white) orphans along the way. When treachery leaves them starving and alone in a northern Minnesota winter, it will take all of their abilities and love to survive. The heartwarming account of Omakayas’s year of travel explores her changing family relationships and culminates in her first moon, the onset of puberty. It would be understandable if this darkest-yet entry in Erdrich’s response to the Little House books were touched by bitterness, yet this gladdening story details Omakayas’s coming-of-age with appealing optimism.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-029787-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
Ironically, by choosing such a dramatic catalyst, the author weakens the adventure’s impact overall and leaves readers to...
A group of talking farm animals catches wind of the farm owner’s intention to burn the barn (with them in it) for insurance money and hatches a plan to flee.
Bond begins briskly—within the first 10 pages, barn cat Burdock has overheard Dewey Baxter’s nefarious plan, and by Page 17, all of the farm animals have been introduced and Burdock is sharing the terrifying news. Grady, Dewey’s (ever-so-slightly) more principled brother, refuses to go along, but instead of standing his ground, he simply disappears. This leaves the animals to fend for themselves. They do so by relying on their individual strengths and one another. Their talents and personalities match their species, bringing an element of realism to balance the fantasy elements. However, nothing can truly compensate for the bland horror of the premise. Not the growing sense of family among the animals, the serendipitous intervention of an unknown inhabitant of the barn, nor the convenient discovery of an alternate home. Meanwhile, Bond’s black-and-white drawings, justly compared to those of Garth Williams, amplify the sense of dissonance. Charming vignettes and single- and double-page illustrations create a pastoral world into which the threat of large-scale violence comes as a shock.
Ironically, by choosing such a dramatic catalyst, the author weakens the adventure’s impact overall and leaves readers to ponder the awkward coincidences that propel the plot. (Animal fantasy. 8-10)Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-33217-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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