A tale of intergenerational bonding that may resonate with adult readers but will leave youngsters cold.
In the Newbery-winning author’s latest, a girl grapples with a beloved elder’s dementia.
Eleven-year-old Sophia (who goes by Sophie) Henry Winslow’s best friend is Sophie Gershowitz, her 88-year-old neighbor. Sophie Gershowitz’s adult son is concerned with her cognitive decline and thinks it may be time for her to move to an assisted living facility. The younger Sophie decides to prepare her friend for the cognitive tests so she’ll pass them and be able to stay. When Sophie Gershowitz struggles to recall three words—tree, table, book—Sophie Winslow invites her to recall related childhood stories in the hopes that it will help. Sophie Gershowitz shares slice-of-life tales from her girlhood in Poland before revealing how everything changed when World War II began. Sophie Winslow reflects: “I had never really got it, never understood history, how things fit together, because I needed someone to tell me the stories…of how things are lost, and what that means and how it hurts.” While the explanation of historical events is age-appropriate and at times compelling, the book feels more geared toward an adult sensibility than a child’s. The pacing is slow, and young Sophie’s storyline seems like an overly padded, self-conscious framing device. The protagonist is a quirk-filled bundle of idiosyncrasies; Lowry aims for precocious but sometimes stumbles into pretentious and judgmental, particularly with young Sophie’s attitudes toward her friend Ralphie’s love of junk food. Physical descriptions of characters are minimal.
A tale of intergenerational bonding that may resonate with adult readers but will leave youngsters cold. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780063299504
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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