Despite uneven pacing, offers a satisfying depiction of middle school pressures.
Seventh grader Lizzie Morris-Artino grapples with anxiety, a crush, running for office, a well-meaning but misguided mother, navigating friendships old and new, and an emotional support dog who’s more popular at school than she is.
Lizzie’s mounting worries and tension, caused by her desire to please everyone around her, manifest in her imagining worst-case scenarios. Physical symptoms, such as stomachaches and panic attacks, begin to interfere with school. Papademetriou infuses the text with humor despite the serious issues she addresses, and ultimately, Lizzie inhabits an environment that’s populated with supportive friends and family. New friend Ant is solidly in her corner, even as she contends with a nasty election cycle against an opponent who’s both popular and petty. The first-person narration contains realistic dialogue, which, along with the use of texting and social media, adds to the authenticity of Lizzie’s perspective; the adults in her life, however, filtered through her perceptions, come across as two-dimensional. The plot is slow to develop, and the obvious conclusion feels tacked on in order to neatly solve the main source of Lizzie’s difficulties. Still, readers will root for Lizzie, and she does have an empowering moment of standing up for herself, but because this scene happened so close to the end of the book, it leaves little time for a thorough resolution. Lizzie is of Greek and Scottish descent.
Despite uneven pacing, offers a satisfying depiction of middle school pressures. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781338603088
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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
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