A hauntingly memorable mixture of humor and honest emotion.
A girl becomes a ghost who is tethered to her family home.
Twelve-year-old Frances Frida Ripley—ruddy-cheeked, with a mass of curly hair and strong, black eyebrows—just wants to have lunch with her best friend at the new seaside restaurant in town. It isn’t her fault she was, as her parents say, “born raging” like the winter storm that welcomed her arrival. After she loses her temper yet again, her parents, who recognize that she’s trying to do better, take her there as an early birthday present. Unfortunately, an earthquake in France causes a devastating tsunami that is heading their way across the English Channel. Coming to soaking wet with sand in her mouth, Frankie realizes she’s dead, well, “dead-ish” and that she’s alone. After a death chaperone gives her a sleeping potion, Frankie awakens 102 years later to find her home restored and opened as a tourist attraction. Annoyed by the tourists, poltergeist Frankie wreaks havoc only to grab the attention of someone sinister. Using her intense emotions, Frankie must kick up a storm to save herself and move on. Told from Frankie’s first-person point of view, this is an entertaining read full of wit mixed with honest, intense feelings. Centered around the theme of allowing oneself to feel and experience anger, sadness, and pain rather than shoving them down, it challenges societal norms of adults “tidying up” kids’ feelings.
A hauntingly memorable mixture of humor and honest emotion. (Paranormal. 10-14)Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-307168-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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
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PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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