Eleven-year-old Ben has acquired a best friend with a somewhat mysterious past. Although he likes and admires Ring, an unusual boy who quickly shakes up his placid life, Ben realizes that Ring is extremely grudging with details about his history before he and his parents moved to town. Ring, tall and skinny, as opposed to Ben, a self-described runt, is an avid bird watcher, an enthusiastic runner, and has an uncanny ability to charm those around him—both adults and kids. Events inexplicably come to a head when Ben, Ring, and their families spend the afternoon having a picnic on a pretty spot next to the town's river. After lunch, Ring walks to the bank of the river and keeps walking until the water covers his head. Even after a week, Ben refuses to accept what must seem obvious to everyone else—that Ring has drowned. But when Ring's parents disappear, too, Ben suspects that something is up. And when Ben hears a TV news report about a runaway boy who's been spotted hitchhiking on the highway, Ben is sure that Ring is still alive. Although the plot is implausible and many of the secondary characters too deliberately colorful and quirky, Ben is an extremely appealing and engaging narrator. Young readers will identify with him, a much more realistic character than the idealized and overwritten Ring. Certainly not a "must have" for the middle-grade library, but an interesting enough story. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83581-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
The poster boy for relentless mischief-makers everywhere, first encountered in No, David! (1998), gives his weary mother a rest by going to school. Naturally, he’s tardy, and that’s but the first in a long string of offenses—“Sit down, David! Keep your hands to yourself! PAY ATTENTION!”—that culminates in an afterschool stint. Children will, of course, recognize every line of the text and every one of David’s moves, and although he doesn’t exhibit the larger- than-life quality that made him a tall-tale anti-hero in his first appearance, his round-headed, gap-toothed enthusiasm is still endearing. For all his disruptive behavior, he shows not a trace of malice, and it’ll be easy for readers to want to encourage his further exploits. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-48087-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
Themes of freedom and responsibility twine between the lines of this short but heavy novel from the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Three months after his mother's death, Rob and his father are living in a small-town Florida motel, each nursing sharp, private pain. On the same day Rob has two astonishing encounters: first, he stumbles upon a caged tiger in the woods behind the motel; then he meets Sistine, a new classmate responding to her parents' breakup with ready fists and a big chip on her shoulder. About to burst with his secret, Rob confides in Sistine, who instantly declares that the tiger must be freed. As Rob quickly develops a yen for Sistine's company that gives her plenty of emotional leverage, and the keys to the cage almost literally drop into his hands, credible plotting plainly takes a back seat to character delineation here. And both struggle for visibility beneath a wagonload of symbol and metaphor: the real tiger (and the inevitable recitation of Blake's poem); the cage; Rob's dream of Sistine riding away on the beast's back; a mysterious skin condition on Rob's legs that develops after his mother's death; a series of wooden figurines that he whittles; a larger-than-life African-American housekeeper at the motel who dispenses wisdom with nearly every utterance; and the climax itself, which is signaled from the start. It's all so freighted with layers of significance that, like Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue (2000), Anne Mazer's Oxboy (1995), or, further back, Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead (1965), it becomes more an exercise in analysis than a living, breathing story. Still, the tiger, "burning bright" with magnificent, feral presence, does make an arresting central image. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7636-0911-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK TO SCREEN
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