Amy’s painful separation from her mother is soothed by a budding friendship with Crystal and her brother Raymond in this idealized story of one girl’s summer. Amy has always been a “mama’s girl” who misses her mother terribly, a starfish missing an arm. During her summer stay at the beach with sock-doll fanatic Great-aunt Jenny, Amy is determined to be brave, to deal with her homesickness, and to try to make new friends. Crystal, who lives next door, snubs her every effort, belittling her for not knowing how to ride a bike, and for knowing sidewalk games from the city, instead of beach games, such as tickle bottom and poke the jelly. Only blind old Mr. Fine, who stands out among a cast of overly agreeable adults, really understands Amy. When Amy enlists Crystal and Raymond to help her steal socks from the line to cure her great-aunt’s “sock doll block,” she lands them in trouble. This tame sequence of events, glimpsed in realistic black-and-white illustrations, is brought to a candy-coated close when Amy rides a bike without training wheels. It’s unfortunate that Amy’s independence and bravery comes only to gain Crystal’s approval; the greater problem is that in presenting an interracial friendship (Crystal and Raymond are African-American), the author smooths over personalities to the point of blandness. (Fiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: June 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-027193-0
Page Count: 88
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
An unhappy young immigrant seeks, and at last regains, a sense of self in this atmospheric, expressionistically illustrated episode. Instead of writing her own name on her papers at school, Yoon calls herself “Cat,” then “Bird”—“I wanted to be BIRD. I wanted to fly, fly back to Korea”—and even, after a classmate’s friendly culinary overture, “Cupcake.” Ultimately, she finds her balance again: “I write my name in English now. It still means Shining Wisdom.” Swiatkowska internalizes Yoon’s adjustment, both by depicting her escape fantasies literally, and by placing figures against expanses of wall that are either empty of decoration, or contain windows opening onto distant, elaborate landscapes. Reminiscent of Allen Say’s work for its tone, theme, and neatly drafted, often metaphorical art, this strongly communicates Yoon’s feelings in words and pictures both. She is also surrounded by supportive adults, and her cultural heritage, though specified, is given such a low profile that she becomes a sort of everychild, with whom many young readers faced with a similar sense of displacement will identify. (Picture book. 8-10)
Pub Date: April 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-35114-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A rescued dog saves an unhappy, silent boy in this gentle story about families, fears and courage.
As she did most recently in Waiting for the Magic (2011), Newbery Medalist MacLachlan shows the support that pets can provide. Zoe’s mother fosters abandoned Great Pyrenees dogs. But when Jack, a new dog, runs away, 9-year-old Phillip, a new neighbor, runs after him. He gets lost, but the dog leads him to a barn where they shelter from a night of rain and hail. Phillip’s parents are having problems; he’s staying for a while with a childless aunt and uncle with little experience with children or dogs, and he won’t talk to anyone. Zoe’s family, on the other hand, is close, chatty and compassionate. They care for each other and for their rescued animals: not only the massively shedding white dogs, but also an African grey parrot whose favorite phrase is “You can’t know.” True. There is much you can't know about people and animals both, and much you don’t know, still, after the story ends. Zoe recalls the experience in a narrative occasionally interrupted by ruminative, present-tense glimpses of Zoe with the dogs at night and summed up in her little sister Alice’s concluding journal entry. The spare prose and extensive dialogue leaves room for the reader’s imagination and sympathy. Beautifully told, quietly moving and completely satisfying. (Fiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4424-2171-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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