A fun, interactive guide to forging your own path in middle school.
Talia Zargari’s notebook helps her deal with the new challenges of sixth grade.
A few weeks into the school year, Dash, Talia’s neighbor and longtime best friend, tells her they can’t be friends anymore. Desperate to fit in, Dash succumbs to peer pressure and teasing from other boys. Hoping to be able to stay close to Dash through their shared love of math, Talia, whose mom is a computer programmer, is excited to join him on the mathlete team. As the only girl, Talia experiences discrimination from the team captain, however, so she decides to start a new, girls-only team. The Mathlete Mermaids show the boys’ team up by winning their first competition. But there is still work to be done in including girls in STEM, and the Mermaids must prove themselves in ways boys don’t. The book shows with authenticity how Talia has to manage complex feelings around growing up, recognizing her own mistakes, and making room for others, particularly when teammate Leticia, a skilled leader, steps in as Mermaids team captain. Talia’s love of code-breaking and scavenger hunts is incorporated through fun puzzles for readers to solve. Fans of Moss’ Amelia’s Notebooks series will feel at home with the engagingly illustrated text and tips for navigating social situations. Talia has tan skin and curly black hair; Dash reads Black, and background characters are diverse in appearance.
A fun, interactive guide to forging your own path in middle school. (author’s note) (Illustrated fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1802-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Walker US/Candlewick
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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