A quirky wonder about truth, perseverance, and the vagaries of fame. In Melville, Kansas, located at the geographic center of the country, an unnamed 11-year-old boy discovers a fossil unlike any ever excavated before. It appears to be the remains of a garden-variety Cretaceous-era mosasaur—Kansas is littered with the remnants of these denizens of an erstwhile inland sea—contained within the belly of an enormous skeletal whale, whose vastness dwarfs modern whales. Our narrator does not start out in pursuit of fame (his original intent was to dig a pond for a water garden), but he is not unaware of the ramifications of his discovery: “[it] would put me in the natural history books for sure, right alongside Darwin [and] Crichton . . .” What follows is an often-hilarious battle for ownership (and bragging) rights for the fossil, with our hero pitted against Fossil Expert from the State Museum, a fearsome nemesis indeed. Jennings (Orwell’s Luck, 2000) draws a delightful portrait of this remarkably determined and self-contained child, who declares early on, “A hole is an achievement. A great hole is a great achievement. I was going to dig a great hole.” The cast of secondary characters is equally engaging, from the boy’s father (who is ready to sell his backyard to the highest bidder) and the redoubtable Fossil Expert, to Tom White Cloud and Miss Whistle (the sympathetic Native American bookstore owner and the beautiful science teacher) to Phil, the Solitary Duck. (“When it comes to conversation, a duck is every bit as good as a dog.”) There is nothing stale about this book; from start to finish, it is every bit as much of an original as Kansascetus humongous himself. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-10228-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Walter Lorraine/Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
Entrancing and uplifting.
A small dog, the elderly woman who owns him, and a homeless girl come together to create a tale of serendipity.
Piper, almost 12, her parents, and her younger brother are at the bottom of a long slide toward homelessness. Finally in a family shelter, Piper finds that her newfound safety gives her the opportunity to reach out to someone who needs help even more. Jewel, mentally ill, lives in the park with her dog, Baby. Unwilling to leave her pet, and forbidden to enter the shelter with him, she struggles with the winter weather. Ree, also homeless and with a large dog, helps when she can, but after Jewel gets sick and is hospitalized, Baby’s taken to the animal shelter, and Ree can’t manage the complex issues alone. It’s Piper, using her best investigative skills, who figures out Jewel’s backstory. Still, she needs all the help of the shelter Firefly Girls troop that she joins to achieve her accomplishment: to raise enough money to provide Jewel and Baby with a secure, hopeful future and, maybe, with their kindness, to inspire a happier story for Ree. Told in the authentic alternating voices of loving child and loyal dog, this tale could easily slump into a syrupy melodrama, but Pyron lets her well-drawn characters earn their believable happy ending, step by challenging step, by reaching out and working together. Piper, her family, and Jewel present white; Pyron uses hair and naming convention, respectively, to cue Ree as black and Piper’s friend Gabriela as Latinx.
Entrancing and uplifting. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283922-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Remarking that ``nothing about the weather is very simple,'' Simon goes on to describe how the sun, atmosphere, earth's rotation, ground cover, altitude, pollution, and other factors influence it; briefly, he also tells how weather balloons gather information. Even for this outstanding author, it's a tough, complex topic, and he's not entirely successful in simplifying it; moreover, the import of the striking uncaptioned color photos here isn't always clear. One passage—``Cumulus clouds sometimes build up into towering masses called cumulus congestus, or swelling cumulus, which may turn into cumulonimbus clouds''—is superimposed on a blue-gray, cloud-covered landscape. But which kind of clouds are these? Another photo, in blue-black and white, shows what might be precipitation in the upper atmosphere, or rain falling on a darkened landscape, or...? Generally competent and certainly attractive, but not Simon's best. (Nonfiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-10546-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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