Striking use of everyday images and timely themes makes this free verse collection meaningful, memorable, and accessible.
Young People’s Poet Laureate Nye explores childhood, conflict, and connectivity through over 100 of her poems, both new and classic.
In the opening section, “The Holy Land of Childhood,” she draws from her childhood and those of others, often speaking from the child’s perspective, striking notes of loneliness, fear, and playfulness. Writing was her refuge from desperately boring early readers while a school assignment to write from the perspective of a kitchen implement turned her into “a sweet sifter in time.” Sad vignettes of her childhood home sit alongside humorous memories. Personal images of war, displacement, and loss pepper the second section, “The Holy Land That Isn’t,” in which Nye focuses on her Palestinian immigrant father’s loss of his Jerusalem home, crystallized in his longing for the figs of his childhood. In a poem dedicated to the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, she pleads for peace for “every ancient space” and, in another, observes “red poppies sleep beneath / dirt and stones” beside the homes of fearful Arab and Jewish children living only “one mile apart.” The final section, “People Are the Only Holy Land,” stresses similarities between diverse peoples, invoking a vision of a world where “it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.” López's evocative art perfectly captures and enhances the mood of dreaming and yearning. Emotionally resonant and stirring, this is a must-have title.
Striking use of everyday images and timely themes makes this free verse collection meaningful, memorable, and accessible. (afterword, notes on poems) (Poetry. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-301345-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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
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