An often bright and fun middle-grade novel.
In this debut novel, an 11-year-old girl hopes to win a spot as guest host on a kids’ talk show, but she faces obstacles from her parents and best friend.
When Natalie Greyson hears that her favorite television show, Kidz Konnection, is holding auditions for a guest host (who must be between the ages of 10 and 12), she’s over the moon. She’s seen every episode and knows everything about its two young hosts, Allie and Chloe. It would be a perfect opportunity for her, except that her parents won’t let her try out. Natalie’s previous enthusiasms have been short-lived, they say, and besides, the audition is the same day as her twin 4-year-old siblings’ photo shoot for a magazine cover, and they want the whole family to be there. Natalie feels betrayed when one of her besties, Kailyn—who always wins the school talent show—wants to audition, even though she doesn’t even watch Kidz Konnection. Natalie is tempted to forge her parents’ signatures on the permission slip and show Kailyn up, but she’ll have to confront whether it’s worth the resulting hurt feelings and lost trust. Sparks offers a fast-paced read, with lots of tween drama about issues such as self-esteem and how to handle obnoxious boys. Many readers will find the humorous Natalie relatable, with her best-friends girls’ club, her insecurities (about burping and blushing), and her love of glitter and feather pens; her blog entries, each ending “That’s me In A Nat Shell,” are contemporary and lively. Sparks treats her protagonist’s relatively minor infractions with a heavy hand, though: “Trust is earned not given,” says Natalie’s father after a mere slip-up by a good girl who’s never lied to her parents, gotten bad grades or been in any real trouble before. Her parents make a good point when they remind Natalie of all the fun activities they attended with her in the past, but to say that the very young twins “have been there for you a lot” is a reach. (After all, they didn’t drive her to practice.) Still, all is forgiven in the end, and Natalie does learn some important lessons.
An often bright and fun middle-grade novel.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1941036105
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Firedrake Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam—but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course. Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant. The song, based on a Xhosa lullaby, still has that hard-to-resist sing-along potential, and the themes of waging peace, collective action, and the benefits of sound ecological practices are presented in ways that children will both appreciate and enjoy. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83271-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister:...
A magnificently creepy fantasy pits a bright, bored little girl against a soul-eating horror that inhabits the reality right next door.
Coraline’s parents are loving, but really too busy to play with her, so she amuses herself by exploring her family’s new flat. A drawing-room door that opens onto a brick wall becomes a natural magnet for the curious little girl, and she is only half-surprised when, one day, the door opens onto a hallway and Coraline finds herself in a skewed mirror of her own flat, complete with skewed, button-eyed versions of her own parents. This is Gaiman’s (American Gods, 2001, etc.) first novel for children, and the author of the Sandman graphic novels here shows a sure sense of a child’s fears—and the child’s ability to overcome those fears. “I will be brave,” thinks Coraline. “No, I am brave.” When Coraline realizes that her other mother has not only stolen her real parents but has also stolen the souls of other children before her, she resolves to free her parents and to find the lost souls by matching her wits against the not-mother. The narrative hews closely to a child’s-eye perspective: Coraline never really tries to understand what has happened or to fathom the nature of the other mother; she simply focuses on getting her parents back and thwarting the other mother for good. Her ability to accept and cope with the surreality of the other flat springs from the child’s ability to accept, without question, the eccentricity and arbitrariness of her own—and every child’s own—reality. As Coraline’s quest picks up its pace, the parallel world she finds herself trapped in grows ever more monstrous, generating some deliciously eerie descriptive writing.
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister: Coraline is spot on. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-97778-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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