An engaging first-person voice and convincing characters make this epistolary novel of friendship and girl power a success.
Claire, the only girl in her small Maryland island school, recounts her fifth-grade year in a series of humorous yet poignant letters to her best friend who moved away.
With Bess in California and Henry, her other best friend, ignoring her, Claire is lonely. She does have the girls’ bathroom to herself, transforming it into a cozy clubhouse where she can read and create wall drawings of her daily trials, which range from Yucky Gilbert’s relentless pursuit to kiss her to Webby’s bullying behavior. From the traditional annual elementary school square dance to the production of A Christmas Carol, in which she plays all female parts, from having hot sauce poured on her pizza to being tripped in soccer—nothing dampens Claire’s spunk. A champion in previous sailing regattas, Claire convinces Henry to crew for her; they are a team again. A touch of magical realism ensures Claire, Webby, and Henry’s success on their school project about local legend Smuggler Joe, thus cementing their friendship. Durfee’s cartoonlike illustrations nicely capture the book’s amusing tone and also affirm that Claire and her six classmates are white, though teacher Mr. Harper has dark skin.
An engaging first-person voice and convincing characters make this epistolary novel of friendship and girl power a success. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-82996-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
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