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
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
Affecting and hopeful.
A stray dog finds her destiny amid the chaos of a Southern California wildfire.
Wombat is a small dog with stubby legs and “silly ears / that look like furry cookies”—almost impossibly cute in Bricking’s occasional pencil-style vignettes. She’s mastered the art of survival, so when a mysterious internal voice prods her to go toward the fire, she resists. “The wrong way is the right way. / The right way is the wrong way,” the voice insists. When she tells fellow stray Silas about it, he tells Wombat she’s a “destiny dog,” bound to “find their person / before their person / can find them.” Convinced, she decides to follow the mysterious instructions. Meanwhile, Henry, a boy who’s leery of dogs, loves the bats at the wildlife rehabilitation center where Mama Ro, a veterinarian, works; his Mama J is a librarian. Henry and Barnabas, a fruit bat at the center, are both uprooted by the fire, and their paths converge with Wombat’s at an emergency shelter. The third-person perspective shifts from character to character in clusters of free-verse poems that fully immerse readers in each one’s experiences in turn. This extra-concentrated delivery of Applegate’s typically spare writing proves effective, balancing terror and sadness with heart and humor. Henry has light brown skin, Mama Ro has curly black hair and brown skin, and Mama J presents white.
Affecting and hopeful. (Verse fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780063221178
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Storytide/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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