For football fans, what’s not to like? (Fiction. 8-12)
A Cinderella theme plays out for middle school football fans in this second book in the Home Team series.
The same buddies are back: Jack, the guy star; Cassie, the girl star; Dominican Gus, representing diversity; and Teddy, the formerly chubby newbie. Having embraced athletics for the first time in his life, Teddy has not only succeeded in making it to the Little League World Series as catcher in series opener The Only Game (2015), but is now trying out for wide receiver, though he’s never played football before. The position calls for strength, speed, and height, but Teddy’s main assets are his hands, or “mitts.” Detailed descriptions of games and keen insights into players’ minds will satisfy sports fans, but they also come off as a tad unrealistic, given these same pals (and indeed, the whole town) were obsessed with baseball in the first book. While there’s plenty of action on the field, there is some action off, including Teddy’s rejection of his father, who left when he was younger and is now back trying to be father and coach, along with a subplot about a beloved music teacher whose program is in danger of being cut. Most satisfying are the camaraderie among the four, their sports chatter, and their dedication to the sport.
For football fans, what’s not to like? (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1000-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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