by Rebecca Behrens ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 24, 2016
This blend of history with mystery and fantasy with realism is a good find indeed.
The mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke becomes an engaging backdrop for a preteen experiencing her own losses.
Nell Dare has her summer all planned: she’ll take tennis lessons with her BFF and stay with her writer father in their New York City apartment while her botanist mother works on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. When her ever quarreling parents separate suddenly and her father leaves without a goodbye, the white girl must give up her dreams and help her mother study the “Mother Vine,” the oldest cultivated grapevine in America, perhaps even known to the first English colonists. In her quiet yet evenly paced narration, the preteen meets two new friends, both also white. She’s drawn to Ambrose, a Colonial re-enactor from England whose own father left and hasn’t returned, and bristles against Lila, a know-it-all local-history buff who searches for ghost activity related to the Lost Colony. Hoping to best Lila, Nell teams up with Ambrose to discover Lost Colony clues and entice her father to return and write about them. Interspersed throughout are diary entries from a member of the Lost Colony. Mounting evidence offers possible connections to the Lost Colony’s fate and Ambrose’s otherworldly relation to the colonists. Readers will have fun realizing the author of the diary entries long before Nell.
This blend of history with mystery and fantasy with realism is a good find indeed. (author’s note, historical notes) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5896-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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by Kate DiCamillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
Tenderly resonant and memorable.
Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.
Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century small-town setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.
Tenderly resonant and memorable. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231052
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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by E.B. White illustrated by Garth Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1952
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
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