by Roderick Townley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002
Princess Sylvie, the plucky and brave heroine of The Great Good Thing (2001), returns to adventures old and new in this brilliantly imagined sequel. She’s now back in print, and instead of there being only one copy of her story in an old house, there are hundreds of copies with new readers. Actually, it’s wearing out all the characters, since people seem to be reading morning, noon, and night, with barely a pause. When their tale is uploaded onto the web, things get even worse, because the words scroll upwards and the characters have to play their lines differently. Even though Sylvie appears in The Writer’s dreams to suggest they are having a hard time of it, the character who The Writer inserts—a Yoga instructor named Rosetta Stein who’s a silent shepherdess in Sylvie’s story—brings some respite but may cause more trouble, too. Then things get really bad, when first parts of words, then great blocks of text, begin to disappear. Sylvie must negotiate the electronic insides of a computer, complete with bots and cookies, to save her story, and her existence. Besides the parallel tales in and outside of the volume, Townley plays wonderfully with ideas: how does a story happen? Why do characters behave as they do? What is more real, readers who come and go, or characters who live on the page (or on the Web) forever? This is all done in vivid, sparkling language, and knowing readers will see references to everything from TV’s Jay Leno to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. (Fiction. 10+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-689-84615-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Richard Jackson/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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by Adam Eli ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
Small but mighty necessary reading.
A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.
Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.
Small but mighty necessary reading. (resources) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Wes Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 2012
Though awkward, this adaptation still makes for a hopeful and inspiring story.
This story, an adaptation for young people of the adult memoir The Other Wes Moore (2008), explores the lives of two young African-American men who share the same name and grew up impoverished on the same inner-city streets but wound up taking completely different paths.
Author Moore grew up with a devoted mother and extended family. After receiving poor grades and falling in with a bad crowd, his family pooled their limited finances to send him to Valley Forge Military Academy, where he found positive role models and became a Corps commander and star athlete. After earning an undergraduate degree, Wes attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. When the author read about the conviction of another Wes Moore for armed robbery and killing a police officer, he wanted to find out how two youths growing up at the same time in the same place could take such divergent paths. The author learns that the other Wes never had the extensive family support, the influential mentors or the lucky breaks he enjoyed. Unfortunately, the other Wes Moore is not introduced until over two-thirds of the way through the narrative. The story of the other Wes is heavily truncated and rushed, as is the author's conclusion, in which he argues earnestly and convincingly that young people can overcome the obstacles in their lives when they make the right choices and accept the support of caring adults.
Though awkward, this adaptation still makes for a hopeful and inspiring story. (Memoir. 12 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-74167-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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by Wes Moore with Erica L. Green
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