David Bravo is having the worst day ever when a time-traveling dog shows up and offers him a chance to do it all over.
Tuesday, Sept. 12, truly takes the cake as the most awful day of 11-year-old David’s entire life. It starts with him anxiously fumbling through his first middle school presentation about his heritage: He has a Brazilian and Mexican American father and a Japanese American mother from Hawaii, and he has difficulty explaining that he is adopted. This is followed by an embarrassing food-poisoning incident that ends with David’s causing an accident that hurts his best friend Antoine’s ankle during cross-country practice. His wish to redo everything is granted by the arrival of Fea, a talking, shape-shifting dog who says her new mission is to help David repair his timestream. His first thought is to fix things for Antoine, worried their friendship may be on the line, but when that doesn’t help, David and Fea end up going back and forth in time trying to make things right. This funny, brave, charming novel is packed full of delights. The plot goes to utterly unexpected and beautiful places in a journey about heritage, culture, choice, and, above all, love and connection. David learns to navigate the many aspects of his identity—his anxiety, his budding romantic feelings for Antoine, and his background as a Latinx by birth—and brings the entire well-developed, diverse cast of characters together while doing so.
A joyful, surprising, time-traveling delight. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-300815-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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Cooler-than-cool newcomer Styx Malone takes the more-sheltered brothers Caleb and Bobby Gene on a mischievous, path-altering, summer adventure of a lifetime as they embrace the extraordinary possibilities beyond the everyday in rural Indiana.
Readers may think an adventure such as they’ll find here wouldn’t be possible in the present day; this story takes place outside, where nature, know-how, creativity, and curiosity rule. Creeks, dirt roads, buried treasures, and more make up the landscape in Sutton, Indiana. Younger brother Caleb narrates, letting readers know from the outset that he’s tired of his dad’s racially tinged determination that they be safely ordinary: “I don’t want to be ordinary. I want to be…the other thing.” With Styx Malone around, Caleb and Bobby Gene will sure figure out what that “other thing” can become. The three black adolescents are enchanted with the miracle of the Great Escalator Trade, the mythic one-thing-leads-to-another bartering scheme that just might get them farther from Sutton than they’ve ever dreamed. As they get deeper and deeper into cahoots with Styx, they begin to notice that Styx harbors some secret ambitions of his own, further twisting this grand summer journey. “How do you move through the world knowing that you’re special, when no one else can see it?” begs the soul of this novel.
Heartening and hopeful, a love letter to black male youth grasping the desires within them, absorbing the worlds around them, striving to be more otherwise than ordinary. Please share. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1595-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Categories: CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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