Enchanting right up to the sequel-beckoning end.
Two girls, one a human and one a Yare, or Bigfoot, feel that they don’t fit in with their families and communities.
Aside from the fact that they are all white, large, 12-year-old Alice, with her hugely unruly hair, looks quite different from her beautiful, distant parents. She’s been mocked and bullied at all seven schools she’s attended. When her parents send her to the Experimental Center for Love and Learning in upstate New York, things seem to be different. The school lies in a beautiful setting near a forest and a lake—across which lives Millie, a very small Yare child. The Yares, known to humans as Bigfoots, live in secret, constantly fearful that humans will discover, then kill or imprison them. Millie, however, wants to learn about the No-Furs, cherishing a desire to become a singer in the No-Fur world. Inevitably, Millie and Alice become friends, but it leads to discovery of the Yares. Will the Yare community be forced to move to escape the humans? Or can Alice and Millie find a way to keep the secret? Weiner writes an engaging tale that helps children to understand both bullying and the difficulties faced by people who in some way deviate from the norm. She alternates the narrative between Alice and Millie, giving the Bigfoots humorously distinctive vocabulary: “snackle” for “snack,” for instance, and “a straightness” for “straight.”
Enchanting right up to the sequel-beckoning end. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7074-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fun, fierce heroine fights architectural ableism with the powers of friendship and capitalism.
A 12-year-old athlete needs new wheels to practice riskier moves in wheelchair motocross.
Emmie’s a daredevil, just like her dad used to be, though her ratty old wheelchair isn’t really up to the jumps, wheelies, and speed she loves. She annoys school staff by doing tricks around campus despite the inaccessibility of the building and portable classrooms. After a mishap, the school imposes an unwanted classroom aide upon her, and a chain of aide-to-teacher gossip leads the school to hold a fundraiser for Emmie’s dream wheelchair. That would sure be faster than Emmie’s continuing to sell custom wheelchair bags online (lovely details about her customers normalize wheelchair use among everyone from a hunter to a LARPer to an entomologist). One customer, AK_SalmonGranny, becomes Emmie’s sounding board as she wrestles with her school’s patronizing paternalism but scolds her for participating in the fundraiser. Emmie’s journey is a solid-but-pleasurable delivery vehicle for any number of Very Important Messages. Emmie is angered by inaccessible architecture and enraged by inspirational glurge. Her coming-of-age, during which she bizarrely learns that as a child from a working-class home whose insurance won’t cover a new wheelchair for some years she apparently shouldn’t accept help buying a new one, is ill-suited to a tale that’s otherwise openly didactic about the social model of disability. Whiteness is situated as the default; contextual clues point to racial diversity in the supporting cast.
A fun, fierce heroine fights architectural ableism with the powers of friendship and capitalism. (author’s note) (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-38865-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A story of family, grief, and loss that’s infused with lots of spirit.
Twelve-year-old Elwood P. McGee has experienced some hard and unexpected changes lately, but he certainly didn’t expect to acquire ghost-sight.
When Elwood was in sixth grade, his adored 17-year-old brother, Noah, died in a tragic accident. A few months later, at the end of the school year, the McGees, who present white, moved from Nashville to the small Tennessee town of Long Hollow, where Elwood’s mother grew up. At least Elwood has made two new friends over the summer—brave Tabitha Tamez, who’s cued Latine, and Sydney Burke, champion of the town’s defunct 1940s movie theater, who reads Black. Elwood is shocked to realize he can see the ghost of his late, estranged maternal grandfather. But it’s not just Pops—it turns out he can talk to ghosts all over the place, and he’s starting to figure out the Ghost Rules they abide by. Elwood uses his newfound abilities to help Sydney and Tabitha save the old theater from a developer alongside its now-deceased founder, Adeline Andrews, the town’s first Black business owner. When it dawns on Elwood that Noah could be a ghost, he makes it his mission to find and talk to him one more time. Debut author Rosenbaum weaves serious topics into this story that’s told with humor, wit, and heart; each character is treated with the utmost care.
A story of family, grief, and loss that’s infused with lots of spirit. (Paranormal. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780823456581
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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