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BEA IS FOR BLENDED

Charming and heartfelt.

Bea’s family of two becomes a family of nine.

For as long as rising sixth grader Bea Embers can remember, she’s lived with her mom, close to Aunt Tam and Grandma Bea. Now, though, Mom is pregnant, and they’re moving in with Mom’s new husband, Wendell; his three sons; and their three pets. Though Wendell’s a refreshingly sensitive man who cries without shame, his son Bryce bullies Bea’s best friend, who seems to have OCD, and mocks Bea for having gotten the Most Valuable Girl soccer trophy while he got Most Valuable Player. Peppered with spirited sarcasm and trenchant observations, Bea’s narration points out the unfairness in the ways boys and girls are socialized—and, particularly, how Bryce never seems to be held accountable. When the school principal tries to keep the girls from forming their own soccer team, the thrust of the story becomes the girls’ efforts to do so anyway, aided by supportive adults. Bea’s teammates, especially her new neighbor and the new girl at school (who is deaf and has an ASL classroom interpreter), inspire her with strength. Even as Bea finds sympathy for Bryce over the death of his mother when he was very small, Bryce distances himself from his obnoxious friends. The resolution to the storyline of the obstructive principal feels unrealistic, but Bea’s team’s communal success is real and wonderful. Characters read as White by default.

Charming and heartfelt. (Fiction. 8-12)

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-06-287816-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

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WRECKING BALL

From the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series , Vol. 14

Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.

The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.

When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.

Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Amulet/Abrams

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019

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CHARLOTTE'S WEB

The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...

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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

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