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
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.
In Matvejs’ novel, a performer with a traveling circus in the Australian Outback tries to keep her family together in the face of intimidating difficulties.
Rose Vitkovskis loves her life in the circus, despite all its hardships: little money, a sleazy boss pressuring her for sex, constant travel through dusty, dying mining towns, bad weather, etc. Mother of five, she also cares for her much older husband, who has dementia, though she’s in love with a married circus clown. It’s all worth it once she gets in the ring, where she performs on the Spanish web and shows off her trained animals. But when a severe storm scatters the troupe, Rose must rise to a new set of challenges. Though Rose continually refers to the wonder and magic of her profession—her “one passion,” per the title—no book could better cure the reader of a desire to run away and join the circus. Its marvels are asserted but thinly described; instead, the book devotes space to supposedly funny episodes involving a quantity and variety of excrement that readers might not believe possible. Toilets, farts, urine, vomit; feces from human, pig, parrot, horse, goose, monkey, dog; the senile old lady repeating “Piss…piss…piss” and “Chamber pot!”—it never ends. When not playing for laughs, it’s for humiliation, as when Rose is made to scrub some filthy toilets while wearing her circus costume in view of laughing local teenagers. Leaving aside bodily waste, it’s also disturbing to see Rose enjoying her sexual exploitation as she responds to her boss’ “ultimate dominance.” The disgusting elements make it more than a little difficult to buy high-flown statements about wonder and magic and how the real world is a nothing but a jail. Similarly, it’s difficult to buy into the thwarted romance between Rose and Freddy, a circus clown. “It’s the circus that protects our love, isn’t it?” she says. “Beyond this world around the big top, our love could never be.” There’s no such thing as divorce? More unbelievable yet is Rose’s fate after returning to civilization, which involves a naked wish-fulfillment fantasy about her journal being made into a movie.
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1434911261
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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