Give this one to kids struggling with a new school or to anyone interested in animal rescue.
Starting middle school can be tough, so Madison Morgan doesn’t think she can handle it without a dog, but her stepfather has other ideas.
For Madison Morgan, middle school doesn’t look promising. Her best friend has more interest in boys and fashion than in spending time with her, and her stepfather’s system for maintaining an orderly household is beginning to bristle. Morgan feels pretty sure she won’t make it through the year without a dog of her own, but her stepfather says no. When he gives in halfway and brings home Lilly, a shelter dog Madison can foster temporarily, she’s angry—she thinks he doesn’t understand her needs, and he didn’t bother to check with her. However, she can’t stay upset for long. Lilly is a great dog, and having her around helps to unlock a power Madison didn’t know she had: She can feel what dogs are feeling and understand them. The power is largely extraneous to the story. While it allows her to bond to animals and feel closer to her late mother, it adds nothing to the book that is not already established by good character development. Madison is a great character: She’s likable and realistic, and readers are likely to relate to her difficulties finding her place in a new world. It’s clear that Madison has always been interested in helping animals, and her dual roles as a foster dog owner and class blogger are more than enough to spark action. After Lilly arrives, Madison becomes more involved in helping dogs. She and a new friend, Cooper, help out at an animal shelter owned by a family friend and post about it on the class blog. Her interest also leads logically to the main conflict of the story: When Madison discovers that something dangerous is happening in her neighborhood, she has to draw on her knowledge, and her family and friends, for help. Animal rescue is an important topic in this book, and resources listed at the end provide options for readers who want to get involved.
Give this one to kids struggling with a new school or to anyone interested in animal rescue.Pub Date: July 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615610955
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Legacy Media Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A must-own for fans of magic, Steele’s book is a fun peek into the history of magic’s golden age.
Steele assembles the long-lost memoirs of the “Queen of Magic,” a once-famous, nearly forgotten female magician.
Aside from Harry Houdini, few magicians from the golden age of magic have any contemporary name recognition—and any that do are men. Yet around the turn of the 20th century, Adelaide Herrmann held her own as a popular female magician. But because magic’s allure waned as the century wore on, few remember her. Enter Steele, a magician and Herrmann fan, who also performed tributes to the late magician. After acquiring Herrmann’s missing memoir in 2010 after it was discovered in a descendant’s closet, Steele edited it for this publication, a compilation of the memoirs along with an impressive selection of photographs, magazine articles and other ephemera. The memoir itself is compelling—it tells of her early life as a dancer and her falling in love with renowned magician Alexander Herrmann—although Steele notes that Herrmann “wasn’t above occasionally re-casting herself into anecdotes that had originally starred her husband. As much as I adore her, I don’t always trust her.” Alexander received all the attention during his life, and when he died, his nephew Leon briefly took over the act but proved ill-suited for the role. Herrmann next stepped up and made the show her own. She traveled across the United States and Europe, encountering floods and fires and often performing the “bullet catch” trick. It’s a fun story improved by Steele’s peppering the text with photographs to illustrate Herrmann’s text, giving the book the feeling of a well-loved scrapbook. The additional ephemera at the back of the book features writing about Herrmann’s costumes, articles Herrmann wrote for magazines about her job and numerous mentions of her in the press.
A must-own for fans of magic, Steele’s book is a fun peek into the history of magic’s golden age.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1883647216
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Intoxicatingly fun; disturbing yet hopeful.
Exuberant, uncensored and wise free verse informed by a benevolent relativism and populated with social outcasts.
Hill’s poems may surface from the depths of a savage city, but savage is hardly the adjective that comes to mind when reading them. Rendered in careful but vibrant language and filtered through Hill’s gently self-deprecating wit, even the grittiest of his poems evince a nonjudgmental candor and a tender concern for human foibles. East St. Louis pervades these poems, not merely as a setting, but as a sort of code, a paradigm and sometimes as a character itself. East St. Louis is the place to find a one-legged prostitute for $10; “a city of immorality and deception / where looking at the wrong woman / can get you killed” and “[taking] one in the leg” is just part of “an ordinary night.” Yet it’s also the place where “taxes are lower” and “people got soul,” where “Glamorous Candy” will pull you into the bathroom and “make life interesting.” Here, you’re part of “a dangerous, exciting, chaotic place.” Hill’s characters are not characters in East St. Louis; they’re characters because of East St. Louis. In fact, amid the scattered topics this collection covers, the one steady theme is the essentialness of context, which Hill explicitly addresses in “Fritangas,” a poem about a Colombian street food, a “beautiful food that comes / with children and dogs and flies / with dirt and smoke / with grease and hoke.” However, when the mayor attempts to clean up the street vendor operations—no “dogs and flies, / no dirt, no smoke, / no grease, no hoke”—the decontextualized fritangas “taste simply awful…clean as a virgin’s kiss.” Comparisons to Bukowski and his dedication to the down-and-out of Los Angeles are inevitable and accurate; Bukowski fans will be hooked immediately. Undeniable, too, is the Beat influence—jazzy rhythms and narrational confessions that echo Gregory Corso, or the long-lined, epic free verse shot through with barely contained eroticism and Eastern religious figures that calls Ginsburg to mind. Hill’s strengths are as varied as his topics. He has the eye and the sensitivity to convey a raw experience without compromise or condescension.
Intoxicatingly fun; disturbing yet hopeful.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1448970087
Page Count: 118
Publisher: PublishAmerica
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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