The latest installment of the Rip and Red series features more basketball action and slices of middle school life.
Mason “Rip” Irving and Blake “Red” Daniels are finishing their fifth-grade year at Reese Jones Elementary school. When their coach, Mr. Acevedo, announces an invitation for their travel-league basketball team to play in the upcoming tournament of champions, the boys are excited. But when Rip’s father comes back into his life as a chaperone for the trip, Rip feels “the best basketball weekend of my life was turning into a disaster.” Rip’s father (who is white) hasn’t been in his life for a long time, and now he may be a distraction at the worst possible time. More than the abundant basketball action, Bildner’s diverse cast of characters is what energizes this tremendously engaging story. Rip is mixed-race (his mom is black), Red is white and on the autism spectrum, and Diego Vasquez, Latino and a cancer survivor, is back playing ball. “You learn a lot about how you deal with things when you have cancer,” Diego tells Rip. But every character has issues to face, and each student, including Rip, comes to realize that “Life is about playing the cards you’re dealt.”
Another solid volume in a fun and lively series. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-30507-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Categories: CHILDREN'S ENTERTAINMENT & SPORTS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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Cooler-than-cool newcomer Styx Malone takes the more-sheltered brothers Caleb and Bobby Gene on a mischievous, path-altering, summer adventure of a lifetime as they embrace the extraordinary possibilities beyond the everyday in rural Indiana.
Readers may think an adventure such as they’ll find here wouldn’t be possible in the present day; this story takes place outside, where nature, know-how, creativity, and curiosity rule. Creeks, dirt roads, buried treasures, and more make up the landscape in Sutton, Indiana. Younger brother Caleb narrates, letting readers know from the outset that he’s tired of his dad’s racially tinged determination that they be safely ordinary: “I don’t want to be ordinary. I want to be…the other thing.” With Styx Malone around, Caleb and Bobby Gene will sure figure out what that “other thing” can become. The three black adolescents are enchanted with the miracle of the Great Escalator Trade, the mythic one-thing-leads-to-another bartering scheme that just might get them farther from Sutton than they’ve ever dreamed. As they get deeper and deeper into cahoots with Styx, they begin to notice that Styx harbors some secret ambitions of his own, further twisting this grand summer journey. “How do you move through the world knowing that you’re special, when no one else can see it?” begs the soul of this novel.
Heartening and hopeful, a love letter to black male youth grasping the desires within them, absorbing the worlds around them, striving to be more otherwise than ordinary. Please share. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1595-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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PERSPECTIVES
A young boy is forced to leave the Chennai jail that is the only home he’s ever known.
When Kabir is deemed too old to stay and is sent out into the world all alone, separated from his wrongfully imprisoned mother, he decides to search for the family of the father he has never met to try to save his mother from her unjustly long sentence. Armed with faith, instinctive wits, and the ability to run fast, Kabir escapes danger and meets Rani, a teenage girl from the marginalized Kurava, or Roma, people who is traveling with her parrot. She teaches Kabir, who has a Hindu mother and a Muslim father, about caste dynamics and survival on the streets. She accompanies him to Bengaluru, where Kabir eventually meets his paternal grandparents. Along the way, their experiences reveal the invisibility of low-caste people in Indian society, tensions between neighboring states over water supplies, and the unexpected kindness of helpful strangers. Kabir’s longing for freedom and justice underscores bittersweet twists and turns that resolve in an upbeat conclusion, celebrating his namesake, a saint who sought to unify Muslims and Hindus. Kabir engages readers by voicing his thoughts, vulnerability, and optimism: While his early physical environment was confined within prison walls, his imagination was nourished by stories and songs. This compelling novel develops at a brisk pace, advanced by evocative details and short chapters full of action.
A gritty story filled with hope and idealism. (author's note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-11247-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S RELIGIOUS FICTION
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