A poignant coming-of-age tale with a compelling mystery at its center.
In this debut middle-grade novel, a girl whose mother has left her makes a life-changing new friend.
It’s nearly a year since Melanie Harper’s mother disappeared. With her father, Melanie moved from Grayson to Fairview, where, in 1980, she’s now in the fifth grade at Buckminster Experimental School. She doesn’t fit in with most other kids and is a target for mean girls like Karen Wagner, who’s always trying to get a look at Melanie’s secret journal. Melanie’s artist father is preoccupied with his work, and she’s often lonely. Things change when a new girl suddenly appears in Melanie’s life. She asks Melanie to call her Sabrina, after the character Sabrina Duncan on Charlie’s Angels. Sabrina is “just about the ideal friend,” and through her encouragement, Melanie gains more social confidence. She stands up to Karen and begins a tentative friendship with Leanne, a girl in the bully’s circle who admires her: “You are different, but you’re just like yourself, when everyone is trying not to be.” Melanie even wins the role of Peter Pan in the school play, hoping that her mother—to whom she’s been sending coded postcards—will attend. When Karen gets hold of the secret journal, things fall apart, bringing Melanie to important new realizations. In her novel, Mathison provides an appealing hero who’s thoughtful, perceptive, and richly imaginative, able to perceive what others don’t: “There’s a door in the world, right there for anyone to see...standing open the whole time and a lifetime of mystery beyond.” Melanie’s emotions are affecting and compassionately described but not histrionic. The secret of her mother’s disappearance—and Sabrina’s arrival—embodies a creative psychological response to sorrow that provides surprises, though some readers may guess them before the end.
A poignant coming-of-age tale with a compelling mystery at its center.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73500-372-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Starr Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A compassionate glimpse of mental illness accessible to a broad audience. (Fiction. 10-14)
A middle school story in which parental depression manifests itself in absence.
Natalie’s vivacious botanist mother (who’s white) has retreated from life, leaving her therapist husband (who’s biracial) and daughter to fill the gaping hole she has left. With the help of an egg-drop contest and a scientific-method project, Natalie explores breakable things and the nurturing of hope. Narrating in first-person, the mixed-race seventh-grader (1/4 Korean and 3/4 white) is drawn to her mother’s book, titled How to Grow A Miracle. It reminds her of when her mother was excited by science and questions and life. With a STEM-inspired chapter framework and illustrated with Neonakis’ scientific drawings, Keller’s debut novel uses the scientific method to unpack the complex emotions depression can cause. Momentum builds over nine months as Natalie observes, questions, researches, experiments, and analyzes clues to her mother’s state of mind. Providing support and some comic relief are her two sidekicks, Dari (a smart Indian immigrant boy) and Twig (Natalie’s wealthy, white best friend). The diversity of the characters provides identity and interest, not issue or plotline. Tension peaks at the egg-drop contest, as the three friends plan to use the prize winnings to bring Natalie’s mother back to life with a gift of a rare cobalt blue orchid. Paralleling their scientific progress, Natalie reluctantly experiences her first visits to talk therapy, slowly opening like a tight bloom.
A compassionate glimpse of mental illness accessible to a broad audience. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1566-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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