Relatable, informative, and needed.
Middle schoolers deal with peer pressure in the age of online bullying.
Sophie Valentine hates crowds. They give her The Shakes, what she calls her panic attacks. Sophie’s best friend, Eve, has always been there for her, especially during the pandemic lockdown, but beginning over Thanksgiving break, Eve took an extended absence from school for inpatient treatment due to suicidality, information that Sophie has kept confidential. Now that Eve’s returned, something has changed—she’s hanging out with the Crash Crew, a group of popular kids known for their online challenges and exclusionary behavior. One group member, Chaz, makes Sophie especially uncomfortable, touching and verbally threatening her. A school forensic science unit involving a fictitious murder encourages Sophie to investigate the causes behind her dissolving friendship with Eve and the actions of the Crash Crew. The short chapters switch among settings that include the Valentine family bookstore (where Sophie helps out), Sophie’s therapy sessions, and school. The chapters close with statements from supporting characters that echo witness testimonies in the science project. Sophie’s gentle conversations with her therapist and her Greek American ER doctor mother help her unpack social media bullying and sexual harassment; both adults provide sound and compassionate advice. Conklin offers readers practical, hope-filled, and developmentally appropriate perspectives on social anxiety and peer pressure. Main characters are coded white.
Relatable, informative, and needed. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780316509176
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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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