A clear “be true to yourself” message emerges in an engaging fairy-tale setting.
A kindly goblin prince tries to become more like his unpleasant peers.
Prince Gar the Goblin isn’t properly mean like his classmates at the Goblin Academy. He likes to cook, saves food scraps for hungry animals, admires beautiful trinkets, values friendship, and enjoys watching leaves drifting from trees. If Gar doesn’t change his nice-guy ways, he’ll displease his royal father and flunk out of the Academy. “We require a certain level of cruelty and unpleasantness from our students,” the Headmaster tells him. “You’re different. You’re too loyal. Too kind.” Thoughtfully conceived, this chapter book for ages 7 and up by Simon (The Adventures of Artie and Zac: The Witch and the Well of Magic, 2021, etc.) is an engaging fairy tale centered on a real-life dilemma for children who feel their authentic selves are at odds with peer and parental pressure to fit in. Simon’s “it’s ok to be different” message, repeated in various ways, is clear, but it takes a less direct approach to supporting a child’s sense of self than do books like Ben Brooks’ Dare To Be Different series of nonfiction chapter books. A witch, for example, tells the king not to turn Gar into a reflection of himself: “His spirit can only bend so much until it breaks.” Gar realizes that trying to prove he can be mean makes him unhappy, and he wonders what he’s becoming (“His recent cruel and unpleasant deeds didn’t make him feel worthy at all”), though depictions of “cruelty” in this age-appropriate tale are notably mild. Simon avoids preachiness with a leavening hodgepodge of entertaining fantasy elements—a cranky wizard, a harpy, a surprise shape-shifter, a rain of toxic frogs, and giant attack chickens—and he accompanies the well-spaced text with his own full-page, black-and-white ink drawings of the fantasy action. And in familiar fairy-tale tradition, as Gar realizes that he can advocate for himself and embrace his differences, his acts of kindness to others bring him an unexpected reward.
A clear “be true to yourself” message emerges in an engaging fairy-tale setting.Pub Date: May 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73589-008-1
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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