A 12-year-old loner makes friends with a popular classmate—who just happens to be an android.
Danny introduces Slick’s story by telling readers how it ends: Slick is dead, he was murdered, and he was an android. This is Slick’s journal, Danny explains, and he’s publishing it because he wants everyone to know the truth. In chapters that shift between Danny’s and Slick’s perspectives, readers meet Danny’s dead best friend as a blond and blue-eyed new kid who has recently moved from New York City. Slick (real name Eric) thinks he’s a regular kid: He’s focused on how many friends he has on Kudos, enthralled with his many pairs of Slick sneakers and his Oldean T-shirts—he is so brand-obsessed he sounds like a present-day social media influencer—and ignored by his equally popularity-hungry parents. But he bonds with Danny over the one thing he loves that isn’t popular: the online game Land X. Their friendship is a first for both of them: Danny’s first friendship at all and Slick’s first friendship that isn’t just about popularity. But can they keep Slick safe from his creators? The satisfying revelation of Slick’s strangeness contrasts engagingly with the absurd humor of this odd-couple friendship, and Vaughan executes her satire effectively for an audience that may not be accustomed to it. Both Slick and Danny present white.
A timely parable for this generation of digital natives . (Science fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-9065-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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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
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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A 12-year-old copes with a brain tumor.
Maddie likes potatoes and fake mustaches. Kids at school are nice (except one whom readers will see instantly is a bully); soon they’ll get to perform Shakespeare scenes in a unit they’ve all been looking forward to. But recent dysfunctions in Maddie’s arm and leg mean, stunningly, that she has a brain tumor. She has two surgeries, the first successful, the second taking place after the book’s end, leaving readers hanging. The tumor’s not malignant, but it—or the surgeries—could cause sight loss, personality change, or death. The descriptions of surgery aren’t for the faint of heart. The authors—parents of a real-life Maddie who really had a brain tumor—imbue fictional Maddie’s first-person narration with quirky turns of phrase (“For the love of potatoes!”) and whimsy (she imagines her medical battles as epic fantasy fights and pretends MRI stands for Mustard Rat from Indiana or Mustaches Rock Importantly), but they also portray her as a model sick kid. She’s frightened but never acts out, snaps, or resists. Her most frequent commentary about the tumor, having her skull opened, and the possibility of death is “Boo” or “Super boo.” She even shoulders the bully’s redemption. Maddie and most characters are white; one cringe-inducing hallucinatory surgery dream involves “chanting island natives” and a “witch doctor lady.”
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean. (authors’ note, discussion questions) (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62972-330-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HEALTH & DAILY LIVING
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