A quietly charming, warmhearted story of enduring friendship.
Two Irish boys growing up near each other but inhabiting entirely different worlds develop a close bond.
This fictionalized account of the childhood of C.S. Lewis opens in Belfast in 1908. Twelve-year-old Davy Caruth and Clive “Jacks” Lewis, nearly 10, meet when Davy accompanies Ma to her housekeeping job at the Lewis’ grand home. Davy’s Da used to work at the shipyard, but with his bad back, he now sells bread from a cart. The family barely scrapes by. Despite their differences, Jacks and Davy bond over a love of reading and escaping into their imaginations; Jacks shares his books with gifted artist Davy, who illustrates his friend’s stories. Their lives diverge when Davy, at age 13, goes to work at the hazardous, grueling shipyard. Not long after, Jacks’ beloved mother dies, and he’s shipped off to a harsh boarding school in England with his brother, Warnie. Sensitive Jacks is miserable, but letters and drawings from Davy lift his spirits. Jacks encourages Davy in his artistic pursuits, which ultimately lead him to take technical drawing classes and get a job designing ships rather than building them. McQuoid uses rich, carefully chosen details to evoke the historical setting. Notably, she compassionately shows the impact of social class constraints and personal hardships on each child without minimizing either of their experiences through simplistic comparisons. The evocative, often poetic, writing will appeal to thoughtful readers.
A quietly charming, warmhearted story of enduring friendship. (facts about C.S. Lewis and Ireland, further reading) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781915071637
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little Island
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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