Runs to surprising depths, and Sammy the donkey will live long in young memory.
Dendler (Dottie’s Daring Day, 2017, etc.) addresses overcoming preconceptions in this middle-grade fairy tale.
Thirteen-year-old Bianca is known throughout the Kingdom of Pacifico as the Frail and Delicate Princess. She was very weak at birth and has spent her entire life in the castle, kept safe by her loving, overprotective father. Bianca does not feel frail and delicate. She may be cosseted (“Never…was she allowed to meet other children….Who knew what kind of diseases they carried?”), but she has grown into a healthy young girl, brimming with imagination and yearning to explore the world. Yet how can she? She is the Frail and Delicate Princess, and that is all there is to it…until a fire-breathing dragon threatens the kingdom and Bianca’s father and his bravest knights march off to do battle with it. When they don’t return, Bianca sneaks out and embarks on her own quest. With only a charismatic donkey for company, she will track down the dragon. She will save the kingdom and be Frail and Delicate no longer! Dendler writes on the safe side of scary, capturing the magical essence rather than the Grimm aspect of fairy tales. Bianca’s adventure may be straightforward, but it remains spry and charming, its message of empowerment no less effective for being overt. Primary school readers surely will empathize with Bianca (nobody should be chained by assumptions of what they can and cannot do), yet hers is not the only life being affected by pigeonholing. Throughout the story, hidden in plain sight amid the palace folk and fairy-tale tropes and exquisitely characterized animals, Dendler presents a subtler exploration of labeling. It’s to her great credit that the book’s denouement, though obvious in retrospect, comes as both uplifting and unforeseen. Bianca, all told, is a memorable middle-grade heroine.
Runs to surprising depths, and Sammy the donkey will live long in young memory.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-93829-4
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Serenity Mountain Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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