Kids who want to see this sort of adventure done well should opt for Varian Johnson’s Jackson Greene books; kids who are...
Max Crumbly is back, blundering through his second misadventure.
When readers last saw the white middle schooler, he had just plunged out of the school’s “vast, labyrinth-like” ventilation system onto the pizza ordered by the three bumbling, white crooks who have taken advantage of the three-day weekend to execute the most incompetent computer heist ever. They are fortunate that it’s dimwitted Max who’s locked in with them. Unbeknownst to them, however, his new, smart friend Erin, also white, is on the phone with Max and has hacked her way into the school computer and now controls all its systems. With Erin’s help, it should be easy for Max to thwart the crime, retrieve his father’s precious comic book, and escape the building. Alas, it is not. As in series opener Locker Hero (2016), Max’s journal provides a play-by-play of the episode (including cartoons of scenes he could not have witnessed), elongated by digressions and larded with vomit and excrement jokes. Also as before, Max’s faux hand-lettered account features cross-outs and emendations that make little to no sense. A couple of well-paced cartoon-only sequences offer effective (if gross) slapstick, but they cannot compensate for the overall unfunniness of the caper.
Kids who want to see this sort of adventure done well should opt for Varian Johnson’s Jackson Greene books; kids who are charmed by puke jokes may find this mildly diverting. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6003-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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