Sweet and heartwarming—but unsettlingly conflicted
A 12-year-old with severe facial burns hides from the world—until she meets the new neighbors, who fly a magic zeppelin and babysit infant stars.
The accident that burned Luna and left her father unable to walk sapped all joy from her life. A compression mask covering half her face is both uncomfortable and weird looking. With Luna’s arm injuries, even drawing brings pain. Her large Italian American family loves her, but their disgusted pity at her facial difference only enhances her panic and shame. Late one night, Luna spies new people moving into the house next door. When Luna follows these new kids into the woods behind her Staten Island home, she discovers them caring for baby stars, and Alessandro and Chiara bring Luna into their world. During the day, narrator Luna is a terrified girl with an overprotective mother, unwilling to speak even with her best friend. But by night, she’s one of the spazzatrici, polishing the sky. Readers familiar with disability tropes will anticipate Luna’s choice: Will she use a star’s magic to wish herself uninjured, or will she learn that the true magic was inside her all along? While Luna’s journey attempts to avoid the shopworn magical-cure trope, it does not wholly succeed; her happy ending requires discovering not just inner, but also outer beauty. The primary cast is an all-white one.
Sweet and heartwarming—but unsettlingly conflicted . (Fantasy. 8-11)Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2896-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Certain to elicit both gales of giggles and winces of sympathy (not to mention recognition) from young readers.
First volume of a planned three, this edited version of an ongoing online serial records a middle-school everykid’s triumphs and (more often) tribulations through the course of a school year.
Largely through his own fault, mishaps seem to plague Greg at every turn, from the minor freak-outs of finding himself permanently seated in class between two pierced stoners and then being saddled with his mom for a substitute teacher, to being forced to wrestle in gym with a weird classmate who has invited him to view his “secret freckle.” Presented in a mix of legible “hand-lettered” text and lots of simple cartoon illustrations with the punch lines often in dialogue balloons, Greg’s escapades, unwavering self-interest and sardonic commentary are a hoot and a half.
Certain to elicit both gales of giggles and winces of sympathy (not to mention recognition) from young readers. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8109-9313-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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