With echoes of Bridge to Terabithia, a nuanced exploration of the tension between enchantment and reality
Instead of having a grand time at camp, Leah’s wandering aimlessly this hot Atlanta summer, overwhelmed by complicated grief.
Leah, a white Jewish 13-year-old, has been going through the motions of friendship this past year. Ever since her kid brother drowned last summer, she’s been drifting through the world like a ghost, with no help from her equally broken parents. With all her friends off enjoying their summer plans, Leah first enjoys the depressive nothingness of a plan-free vacation but is eventually driven out of the house by boredom. And it’s then, on an overgrown farm hidden near her wealthy corner of the city, that she first meets Jasper, who's 14. Jasper, an almost magical-seeming white redhead who does her laundry in the creek, evokes fairy tales for Leah. In the overgrown cottage where Jasper lives alone, Leah feels like she’s in the Vine Realm, having the kind of adventure “every kid fantasizes about.” But Jasper is on the run from a terrible home situation, and while she treasures her friendship with Leah, she still wants Leah to remember that she is homeless: “We aren’t playing Narnia or Hogwarts.” It takes Leah a long time to understand that the fantastical beauty she sees in Jasper’s overgrown encampment is really a desperate reality, but thanks to Snyder’s careful symbolism and meticulous tracking of class markers, children will see it before she does.
With echoes of Bridge to Terabithia, a nuanced exploration of the tension between enchantment and reality . (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283662-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato.
The new kid in school endures becoming the school mascot.
Ben Hardy has never cared for potatoes, and this distaste has become a barrier to adjusting to life in his new Idaho town. His school’s mascot is the Spud, and after a series of misfortunes, Ben is enlisted to don the potato costume and cheer on his school’s team. Ben balances his duties as a life-sized potato against his desperate desire to hide the fact that he’s the dork in the suit. After all, his cute new crush, Jayla, wouldn’t be too impressed to discover Ben’s secret. The ensuing novel is a fairly boilerplate middle–grade narrative: snarky tween protagonist, the crush that isn’t quite what she seems, and a pair of best friends that have more going on than our hero initially believes. The author keeps the novel moving quickly, pushing forward with witty asides and narrative momentum so fast that readers won’t really mind that the plot’s spine is one they’ve encountered many times before. Once finished, readers will feel little resonance and move on to the next book in their to-read piles, but in the moment the novel is pleasant enough. Ben, Jayla, and Ben’s friend Hunter are white while Ellie, Ben’s other good pal, is Latina.
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-11866-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A didactic blueprint disguised as a supernatural treasure map.
A girl who delights in the macabre harnesses her inherited supernatural ability.
It’s not just her stark white hair that makes 11-year-old Zee Puckett stand out in nowheresville Knobb’s Ferry. She’s a storyteller, a Mary Shelley fangirl, and is being raised by her 21-year-old high school dropout sister while their father looks for work upstate (cue the wayward glances from the affluent demography). Don’t pity her, because Zee doesn’t acquiesce to snobbery, bullying, or pretty much anything that confronts her. But a dog with bleeding eyes in a cemetery gives her pause—momentarily—because the beast is just the tip of the wicked that has this way come to town. Time to get some help from ghosts. The creepy supernatural current continues throughout, intermingled with very real forays into bullying (Zee won’t stand for it or for the notion that good girls need to act nice), body positivity, socio-economic status and social hierarchy, and mental health. This debut from a promising writer involves a navigation of caste systems, self-esteem, and villainy that exists in an interesting world with intriguing characters, but they receive a flat, two-dimensional treatment that ultimately makes the book feel like one is learning a ho-hum lesson in morality. Zee is presumably White (as is her rich-girl nemesis–cum-comrade, Nellie). Her best friend, Elijah, is cued as Black. Warning: this just might spur frenzied requests for Frankenstein.
A didactic blueprint disguised as a supernatural treasure map. (Supernatural. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304460-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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