A well-paced, insightful exercise in observation and empathy.
A class of kids consider their communities.
In Park and Sae-Heng’s The One Thing You’d Save (2021), Ms. Chang’s students pondered what they might rescue from a burning house. The children are back with a new assignment and fresh opportunities for contemplation. The title reveals the game again: Granted the opportunity to give a gift of any size or value to someone, who might you choose, and what would you give? Some kids go simple—a signed baseball or a gaming system for a friend—while others consider their recipients’ special talents, like a restaurant where an abuela can share her delicious Honduran baleadas with the world. Many kids’ responses display an acute understanding of the challenges facing the adults in their lives—imagining a comfy chair for an exhausted building super or plane tickets for school staff who can’t afford to visit family abroad. Sae-Heng’s quiet, evocative images of both grief and gifts imbue meaning in scenes as small as a lost sibling’s photo and as sweepingly grand as the Himalayas. Subtly following the concept of sijo—a Korean three-line syllabic verse form—Park’s novel gives youthfully meandering thoughts structure while still allowing them to flow freely. Names and other details suggest a diverse student body; some of the gifts chosen gesture toward economic diversity as well.
A well-paced, insightful exercise in observation and empathy. (Verse fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063324633
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
A successful call for creating and imagining, even if the story itself falls short.
In the dystopian, totalitarian world of 2099, 14-year-old Tessa and her family are desperate to solve the mystery of her twin brother Theo’s disappearance.
Tessa is growing up in a time when playgrounds are historical relics, surveillance cameras are everywhere, music is outlawed, and owning books is illegal. Under the absolute rule of Zokiris, the decadeslong leader of her territory, people are heavily controlled. When Theo vanishes under mysterious circumstances and his name is erased from the Territory Statistics list, Tessa’s 135-year-old neighbor, Miriam, gives the family contraband books that become central to figuring out Theo’s whereabouts. Most books have long since been seized and stored away in Building 903; Tessa is intrigued by their presence in her home, while her mother is terrified. Lowry, the acclaimed, award-winning author of The Giver (1993), shines in her creation of uncomfortably believable dystopian societies. Tessa’s painfully limited world is fully imagined, with its own history, laws, and norms. Her relationship with her brother reads as realistic and tender and is crucial to the mystery. Miriam is the most strongly developed character: wise and independent, unafraid and hopeful. While the climb to the book’s climax is captivating, the hurried resolution is disappointing. The powerful messaging around the importance of literature and imagination certainly resonates, however. The main characters present white.
A successful call for creating and imagining, even if the story itself falls short. (Dystopian. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780063515109
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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