This highly anticipated sequel delivers less heart and more education.
Fifth grader Lina Gao grapples with social media and puberty in this follow-up to Finally Seen (2023).
A few months after the events of the previous book, Lina’s mother’s bath bomb business is stalling, so she records a heartfelt social media marketing video. It immediately goes viral, inspiring Lina to overcome her self-consciousness about her changing body to post online videos supporting the business, too. When her mother abruptly gives Lina her old phone, she finally feels included at school, diving headfirst into the world of texting and posting on social media. But along with the initial highs of connection, Lina experiences practically every negative impact of internet use, including misinformation, trolling, a craving for views, envy, FOMO, and body shame. After phone use by Lina and her classmates becomes more disruptive, their teacher explains the science behind what they’re experiencing, sharing information about dopamine, oxytocin, algorithms, and the online disinhibition effect. Things come to a head when Lina enters a flame war on Discord and gets accused of cyberbullying just as best friend Carla discovers she’s been catfished. While Yang clearly has an important message to deliver, and readers will learn a lot about the dangers of the internet and social media, her depiction of fifth graders’ out-of-control phone use and the focus on teachable episodes cataloging online harms leave little room for organic storytelling and character development.
This highly anticipated sequel delivers less heart and more education. (author’s note, social media research) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781665947930
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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