Despite the strong technology plot, the poor execution in the friendship storylines undermines the moral of the story.
The coding club girls prepare a technological treat for the school dance while fashionista Maya deals with friendship and bad influences.
Over the summer, Chinese-American Maya got in big trouble hanging out with the neighbors’ visiting niece, shoplifter Nicole: Maya attempted to steal a bottle of nail polish and crashed into the display, getting busted and losing her mother’s trust. When Nicole permanently moves to the neighborhood and starts in at Maya’s school, she’s quick to apologize, repent, and seek to renew friendship with Maya. In spite of her mother’s misgivings, Maya gives Nicole another chance. But certain signs (some legitimate, some overblown) point to Nicole as trouble, and Maya’s limited time is at a premium. Nicole competes for it against the coding club and its newest project. Their task is to use code to creatively, artistically enhance the upcoming school dance, and they choose to program lights to respond to music. The troubleshooting and trial-and-error elements of the code storyline effectively demonstrate how and what can be done with code, and they are far more believable than the forced, frequently unsatisfying social storylines. The latter include some dance drama involving Latina Sophia, African-American Lucy, and white Erin that is easily resolved—Pakistani-American Leila is spared it altogether. Given Maya’s careful delineation of club members’ races, her failure to identify Nicole jars.
Despite the strong technology plot, the poor execution in the friendship storylines undermines the moral of the story. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-54253-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
Poignant and heartwarming.
Zephyrina the cat, the “Robin Hood of felines,” rescues discarded toys so they can have new lives.
Zephyrina brings toys back to the apartment she shares with Elizaveta and her daughter, Dasha, refugees from war-torn Ukraine. Dasha reconditions Zephyrina’s rescues and sets them outside for three days, just in case they have owners who want to reclaim them. Afterward, they join the other toys in the parlor—the Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasured. Dasha and Elizaveta don’t know that the toys are sentient. At midnight they abandon their rigid daytime postures to cavort and play, overseen by their leader, Pocket, a tiny mascot bear made to comfort soldiers during World War I. One night, Zephyrina brings back a dirty old bear, and Pocket is astounded. The new arrival, Berwon, might come from a lost shipment of the first-ever stuffed bears, sent from Germany to the U.S. in 1903—and if so, he’s worth a fortune. In the ensuing antics, the unpleasant villain Picky Vicky covets Berwon, and a kind museum curator does, too, but for different reasons. Applegate’s writing is exquisitely nuanced; she couches profound themes in accessible language that depicts relatable situations. Gentle, generous Elizaveta and Dasha poignantly underscore the human impact of wars. Santoso’s enchanting, delicate, black-and-white illustrations bring the timeless feeling of a classic to this hopeful, humanizing story of the distressed looking out for each other.
Poignant and heartwarming. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781250904362
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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