An homage navigated with confidence and care, as wise and wonderful as the original.
This 50th-anniversary celebration of a literally timeless classic brings Babbitt’s novel to life in a graphic novel format.
Sticking closely to the storyline as she visually fleshes out its themes and characters, Woodman-Maynard serves up a sensitive reworking that invites readers to think about what they would do if they were given the choice between a normal, finite life and an endless one. It’s a choice that lonely, 10-year-old Winnie Foster is left to make after she meets the Tucks (who stopped aging after drinking from a hidden spring near her house 87 years before) and hears their perspectives on what it’s like to watch everyone and everything they know change and die. The woodsy, small-town setting and the white-presenting cast—from exuberant, ever-17-year-old Jesse Tuck and his resigned mother, Mae, to the distinctively angular villain known only as “the man in the yellow suit,” and even a certain significant golden toad—are beautifully realized in the finely drawn watercolors. Along with incorporating atmospheric expository lines from the book into her scenes, the artist tucks in pinwheels and other circular imagery to evoke what melancholy father Angus Tuck describes as the ever-moving wheel of life and death: “You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got.” The book closes with a conversation between Babbitt’s daughter, Lucy, and the adapter, as well as illuminating photos and process notes.
An homage navigated with confidence and care, as wise and wonderful as the original. (Graphic fantasy. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780374391850
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense.
In the midst of political turmoil, how do you escape the only country that you’ve ever known and navigate a new life? Parallel stories of three different middle school–aged refugees—Josef from Nazi Germany in 1938, Isabel from 1994 Cuba, and Mahmoud from 2015 Aleppo—eventually intertwine for maximum impact.
Three countries, three time periods, three brave protagonists. Yet these three refugee odysseys have so much in common. Each traverses a landscape ruled by a dictator and must balance freedom, family, and responsibility. Each initially leaves by boat, struggles between visibility and invisibility, copes with repeated obstacles and heart-wrenching loss, and gains resilience in the process. Each third-person narrative offers an accessible look at migration under duress, in which the behavior of familiar adults changes unpredictably, strangers exploit the vulnerabilities of transients, and circumstances seem driven by random luck. Mahmoud eventually concludes that visibility is best: “See us….Hear us. Help us.” With this book, Gratz accomplishes a feat that is nothing short of brilliant, offering a skillfully wrought narrative laced with global and intergenerational reverberations that signal hope for the future. Excellent for older middle grade and above in classrooms, book groups, and/or communities looking to increase empathy for new and existing arrivals from afar.
Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense. (maps, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-88083-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
PROFILES
An endearing protagonist runs the first, fast leg of Reynolds' promising relay.
Castle “Ghost” Cranshaw feels like he’s been running ever since his dad pulled that gun on him and his mom—and used it.
His dad’s been in jail three years now, but Ghost still feels the trauma, which is probably at the root of the many “altercations” he gets into at middle school. When he inserts himself into a practice for a local elite track team, the Defenders, he’s fast enough that the hard-as-nails coach decides to put him on the team. Ghost is surprised to find himself caring enough about being on the team that he curbs his behavior to avoid “altercations.” But Ma doesn’t have money to spare on things like fancy running shoes, so Ghost shoplifts a pair that make his feet feel impossibly light—and his conscience correspondingly heavy. Ghost’s narration is candid and colloquial, reminiscent of such original voices as Bud Caldwell and Joey Pigza; his level of self-understanding is both believably childlike and disarming in its perception. He is self-focused enough that secondary characters initially feel one-dimensional, Coach in particular, but as he gets to know them better, so do readers, in a way that unfolds naturally and pleasingly. His three fellow “newbies” on the Defenders await their turns to star in subsequent series outings. Characters are black by default; those few white people in Ghost’s world are described as such.
An endearing protagonist runs the first, fast leg of Reynolds' promising relay. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5015-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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