Delightful.
Here’s a different Becky Thatcher: She spews spitballs, prefers overalls to dresses, takes dares from boys and tracks down criminals.
In this debut novel, Becky’s voice, full of Southern expressions and superstitions, describes events that occur in her new hometown of St. Petersburg, Mo., during the time that steamboat captain and aspiring writer Sam Clemens is boarding with Tom Sawyer and Aunt Polly. As Becky digs up a beetle to avenge a cruel insult to her best friend, she muses: “I didn’t know why they were called gull beetles, but I reckoned it had something to do with the high-pitched shriek Ruth Bumpner would let out when she found one buried in her egg salad sometime in the next week or so.” Even as Becky’s adventures reveal bits of plot and characters that will later be found in Mark Twain’s writing, readers also enter Becky’s personal world, which includes the different ways she and her parents are grieving her beloved brother’s death. The novel’s predominantly light tone and narrative perspective make the flatness of the villains forgivable—there’s a sadistic schoolteacher, a snobbish family and two stupid smugglers—while Becky and her many allies are all realistically well-rounded. Beneath the lively story is a subtext that both primes readers for reading Mark Twain and responds to the question of where writers find inspiration.
Delightful. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4814-0150-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean.
A 12-year-old copes with a brain tumor.
Maddie likes potatoes and fake mustaches. Kids at school are nice (except one whom readers will see instantly is a bully); soon they’ll get to perform Shakespeare scenes in a unit they’ve all been looking forward to. But recent dysfunctions in Maddie’s arm and leg mean, stunningly, that she has a brain tumor. She has two surgeries, the first successful, the second taking place after the book’s end, leaving readers hanging. The tumor’s not malignant, but it—or the surgeries—could cause sight loss, personality change, or death. The descriptions of surgery aren’t for the faint of heart. The authors—parents of a real-life Maddie who really had a brain tumor—imbue fictional Maddie’s first-person narration with quirky turns of phrase (“For the love of potatoes!”) and whimsy (she imagines her medical battles as epic fantasy fights and pretends MRI stands for Mustard Rat from Indiana or Mustaches Rock Importantly), but they also portray her as a model sick kid. She’s frightened but never acts out, snaps, or resists. Her most frequent commentary about the tumor, having her skull opened, and the possibility of death is “Boo” or “Super boo.” She even shoulders the bully’s redemption. Maddie and most characters are white; one cringe-inducing hallucinatory surgery dream involves “chanting island natives” and a “witch doctor lady.”
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean. (authors’ note, discussion questions) (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62972-330-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Budding heroes defeat class and gender expectations as well as the occasional monster in this wry outing.
Thinking that it’s better to be fake knights than real peasants, Tim and his best buddy, Belinda, sign up to rescue a captured princess.
Unaware that they’ve been snookered into a dastardly scheme, the two youngsters hear that Princess Grace from the next kingdom over has been carried off in the claws of a fearsome and funky “stinx” and volunteer to accompany (reputedly) brave and noble Prince Ruprecht and his (reputedly) powerful magician Nerlim on a rescue mission. Accompanied by village idiot Ferkle, whose habit of shoving mud in his pants effectively lowers the level of humor even further, the two ersatz knights weather the Forest of Doom, the River of Doom, and a “troll bridge” across the Chasm of Doom despite a suspicious lack of assistance from either the prince or the magician…and arrive to discover that neither the stinx nor the princess is quite as expected either. In fact, the princess ends up being the rescuer (“That’s what you call irony,” she comments) when Ruprecht and Nerlim announce their intention to seize her and do away with any inconvenient witnesses. Tim and Belinda are rewarded with promotions for their efforts; readers will come away with both a cogent warning from Gibbs about the dangers of falling for fake news and better vocabularies due to his penchant for flagging significant words like gullible and malodorous in the narrative and then pausing to define and use them in sample sentences. Along with a full-spread map, Curtis supplies frequent pen-and-ink sketches of the cast in comical poses and straits. The races and ethnicities of the characters are not specified in the text, though cover art depicts characters of various skin tones.
Budding heroes defeat class and gender expectations as well as the occasional monster in this wry outing. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-9925-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
