A feel-good tween drama packed with positive life lessons.
Millie, Nora, and Bea, with help from their magical fortune tellers, have patched up their friendship and are looking forward to a summer adventure together.
In 2024’s Fortune Tellers, a misunderstanding, the pandemic, and family moves separated the longtime friends—until mysterious messages in fortune tellers they’d created years ago led them to reconcile. Now, after Millie invites them to her house on a lake in the Berkshires, the rising eighth graders, who are cued white, are excited—and a little anxious—about being together nonstop for a month. In alternating chapters, each girl reveals her innermost thoughts. During their vacation, the friends will also be running their own little summer camp for 8-year-old triplets. After some discussion about whether to share their special secret, they introduce their charges to the joys of folding paper fortune tellers and writing on them with the magical Write Your Destiny markers. Once again, the fortune tellers start delivering messages the girls need to hear, not necessarily the words they wrote, helping them navigate interpersonal conflict, crushes, and family issues. When they decide to protest some proposed commercial development of the area, the fortune teller messages encourage them. Greenwald expertly describes the emotions behind the girls’ experiences as well as the commitment that leads them to pledge to be open about their feelings with each other, and Millie’s and Nora’s Jewish identities are woven into the story.
A feel-good tween drama packed with positive life lessons. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780063255906
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Quirky and imaginative—postmodern storytelling at its best.
Friendly curiosity and a gift for naming earn a polar bear an assortment of (mostly animal) friends, adventures, mishaps, and discoveries.
Arriving at a northern ocean, Duane spies a shipwreck. Swimming out to investigate, he meets its lone occupant, C.C., a learned snowy owl whose noble goal is acquiring knowledge to apply “toward the benefit of all.” Informing Duane that he’s a polar bear, she points out a nearby cave that might suit him—it even has a mattress. Adding furnishings from the wreck—the grandfather clock’s handless, but who needs to tell time when it’s always now?—he meets a self-involved musk ox, entranced by his own reflection, who’s delighted when Duane names him “Handsome.” As he comes to understand, then appreciate their considerable diversity, Duane brings out the best in his new friends. C.C., who has difficulty reading emotions and dislikes being touched, evokes the autism spectrum. Magic, a bouncy, impulsive arctic fox, manifests ADHD. Major Puff, whose proud puffin ancestry involves courageous retreats from danger, finds a perfect companion in Twitch, a risk-aware, common-sensical hare. As illustrated, Sun Girl, a human child, appears vaguely Native, and Squint, a painter, white, but they’re sui generis: The Canadian author avoids referencing human culture. The art conveys warmth in an icy setting; animal characters suggest beloved stuffed toys, gently reinforcing the message that friendship founded on tolerance breeds comfort and safety.
Quirky and imaginative—postmodern storytelling at its best. (Animal fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3341-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Telgemeier’s bold colors, superior visual storytelling, and unusual subject matter will keep readers emotionally engaged and...
Catrina narrates the story of her mixed-race (Latino/white) family’s move from Southern California to Bahía de la Luna on the Northern California coast.
Dad has a new job, but it’s little sister Maya’s lungs that motivate the move: she has had cystic fibrosis since birth—a degenerative breathing condition. Despite her health, Maya loves adventure, even if her lungs suffer for it and even when Cat must follow to keep her safe. When Carlos, a tall, brown, and handsome teen Ghost Tour guide introduces the sisters to the Bahía ghosts—most of whom were Spanish-speaking Mexicans when alive—they fascinate Maya and she them, but the terrified Cat wants only to get herself and Maya back to safety. When the ghost adventure leads to Maya’s hospitalization, Cat blames both herself and Carlos, which makes seeing him at school difficult. As Cat awakens to the meaning of Halloween and Day of the Dead in this strange new home, she comes to understand the importance of the ghosts both to herself and to Maya. Telgemeier neatly balances enough issues that a lesser artist would split them into separate stories and delivers as much delight textually as visually. The backmatter includes snippets from Telgemeier’s sketchbook and a photo of her in Día makeup.
Telgemeier’s bold colors, superior visual storytelling, and unusual subject matter will keep readers emotionally engaged and unable to put down this compelling tale. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-54061-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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