A warmly genuine and starkly accurate rural environmental story.
An environmental mystery unfolds alongside a personal one on a family farm in Iowa.
Twelve-year-old Xyla, a keen horologist, much prefers to be at the library or with her collection of clocks instead of doing daily chores on the farm where five generations of her white family before her have lived. Unfortunately, her single mother’s demands never seem to end. With no information about her father, not even his name, Xyla’s questions gnaw at her, and she’s desperate for answers. The arrival of bubbly Alegría DeSoto, the daughter of Mexican immigrants who are renting a house on the farm, brings a fresh perspective to Xyla’s search. Xyla’s mother’s interspersed journal entries, mostly from the 1980s, appear in verse and chronicle an unfolding crisis. Hoffmann strikes a strong balance between history, science, and contemporary environmental concerns. The characters’ emotions echo across the dual timelines. Without overwhelming readers, the story makes space for multiple complex issues, including an authentically portrayed neurodiverse main character who’s prone to amusing exclamations (“Gagging hagfish!”, “Tasmanian turd-twizzlers!”, “Backstabbing botflies!”). Along with the storylines following Xyla and her mom as a young person, this creative novel includes interludes from the perspective of time, the weather, and the land, giving readers a multidimensional perspective on the farm and the intergenerational struggle for understanding.
A warmly genuine and starkly accurate rural environmental story. (maps, author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780316580052
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A successful call for creating and imagining, even if the story itself falls short.
In the dystopian, totalitarian world of 2099, 14-year-old Tessa and her family are desperate to solve the mystery of her twin brother Theo’s disappearance.
Tessa is growing up in a time when playgrounds are historical relics, surveillance cameras are everywhere, music is outlawed, and owning books is illegal. Under the absolute rule of Zokiris, the decadeslong leader of her territory, people are heavily controlled. When Theo vanishes under mysterious circumstances and his name is erased from the Territory Statistics list, Tessa’s 135-year-old neighbor, Miriam, gives the family contraband books that become central to figuring out Theo’s whereabouts. Most books have long since been seized and stored away in Building 903; Tessa is intrigued by their presence in her home, while her mother is terrified. Lowry, the acclaimed, award-winning author of The Giver (1993), shines in her creation of uncomfortably believable dystopian societies. Tessa’s painfully limited world is fully imagined, with its own history, laws, and norms. Her relationship with her brother reads as realistic and tender and is crucial to the mystery. Miriam is the most strongly developed character: wise and independent, unafraid and hopeful. While the climb to the book’s climax is captivating, the hurried resolution is disappointing. The powerful messaging around the importance of literature and imagination certainly resonates, however. The main characters present white.
A successful call for creating and imagining, even if the story itself falls short. (Dystopian. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780063515109
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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