A slightly saccharine deep dive into queer friendship.
A nonbinary middle schooler experiences the highs and lows of friendship.
Twelve-year-old Eden Jones is lonely. Even after switching schools, they haven’t made any friends, but they’ve been lying to their mom to keep her from worrying. This ruse works fine until Mom excitedly announces she’s throwing Eden their first birthday party with other kids. Now, socially anxious Eden, who’s white, must approach the classmates they’ve claimed were friends and invite them to the celebration. Outgoing Duke Herrera, a popular Filipino American basketball player, befriends Eden right away, bonding over being trans, while white lesbian Tabitha Holt and genderqueer Jackie Marshall, who’s Black, take a little more effort to grow close to. Even trickier to approach is pansexual Ramona Augustus, whom Duke warns Eden against. Eden finds themself with a group of friends for the first time, but as their lies pile up, their newfound social acceptance is threatened. The book’s depiction of social anxiety rings true; Eden refuses to raise their hand in class and uses breathing exercises to cope. The characters are lovable if a bit smooth around the edges; even when they mess up, each has good intentions, and conflicts are handled in a textbook-perfect way. But Riley’s fictional world is one in which queer joy always triumphs, and that alone is a breath of fresh air.
A slightly saccharine deep dive into queer friendship. (author’s note, queer glossary, resources) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781339027647
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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