A vividly written historical novel by a promising new voice.
Two sisters must learn to take care of each other in Lindstedt’s debut novel for children.
In 1960s rural Texas, African American siblings Sandy Forte and her sister, Glory, navigate a world of segregation, abandonment, and poverty in this collection of loosely connected stories and parables. Readers experience Sandy’s first memory at age 3 at her grandmother’s small cottage in Hooks, Texas, on the day their mother departs for Chicago. The same day, Sandy is injured in a traumatic lawn-mowing accident, and her sister stops speaking. Sandy is tended and nurtured by her grandmother, who reads her Bible verses each night and sews dolls from a rag pile. Like the tales Grandma spins, Sandy’s stories seem to dance along the line between fiction and truth. For example, when she swallows a firefly on a dare, the insect becomes a metaphor for an inner light—an intuition that Grandma helped activate. A few years later, Sandy and Glory take an epic train ride to Chicago, where bullies, and their mother, Janetta Mae, await them. Their busy, distracted mom juggles a job, a pregnancy, and her boyfriend’s three children. Sandy, left to her own devices, must clear life’s hurdles on her own. She gets into a vicious fight with a schoolteacher, plots to get even with a bully, and finds a way to take a school field trip thanks to a lucky break. Despite the odds, Sandy always finds a way to come out on top. Overall, the novel’s plot feels thin, and several characters are introduced only to be abandoned. However, Lindstedt’s vibrant, poetic prose overcomes these flaws. Her descriptions of the Texas setting are particularly winning: “The sky was black as blood pudding, but our front yard was filled with swarming lights.” The text is filled with other, similarly sensory-heightening sentences: “Crickets were having some kind of a party, dancing and singing in the grass outside my window.” Each chapter begins with a poem that reads like an entry from Sandy’s personal diary, and folksy, black-and-white illustrations by Groat and Hall are also included.
A vividly written historical novel by a promising new voice.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-67-913332-7
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
All weird whimsy but little heart.
Three children seek acceptance and love through peculiar means.
Ten-year-old triplets Barnacle, Melancholy, and Garlic “decided to be as weird as possible” to get the attention and affection of their rich, eccentric, and neglectful parents. When this ploy fails and their parents abandon them, they push away their adoptive mother, Miss Emily, so she can’t disappoint them, too. But sunny Miss Emily refuses to give up—even when the kids’ biological parents, Mr. Weirdie and the Enchantress, return to claim them as part of a scheme to get their hands on more money. The parents are terrible, and the children have a taste for destruction and violence. They’re also impossibly odd: Barnacle doesn’t have a skeleton, Melancholy collects “bones and teeth and the occasional ear,” and Garlic naps with ticks and poison oak. The book contains two stories—“In Which Misery Rains Down on Innocent People” and “In Which Tragedy Runs Amok”—and the ending of the second one feels unsatisfying and designed to set up a sequel. The plot is fairly simple, and the characters lack depth; the narrator speaks directly to readers, but much of the humor is likely to sail over younger audiences’ heads. The Mad Libs–esque weirdness is the whole point, but it comes across as window dressing, overpowering the messages about trust, love, and fitting in. The Weirdies are “so white you [can] almost see through them,” and Emily is cued white. Final art not seen.
All weird whimsy but little heart. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780316572699
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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Pratchett-like worldbuilding centers immigrant kids in a story filled with culture, humor, and heart.
At home in Haiti, 10-year-old Gabrielle Marie Jean loves the rain, scary stories, beating the boys in mango-eating contests, and her family, most of all.
When her parents’ paperwork issues mean she must immigrate to the United States alone, every heavenly thing she believes about America can’t outweigh the sense of dread she feels in leaving everything she knows behind. A preternaturally sensitive child, Gabrielle feels responsible for not only her own success, but her whole family’s, so the stakes of moving in with her uncle, aunt, and cousins in Brooklyn are high—even before Lady Lydia, a witch, tries to steal her essence. Lydia makes her an offer she can’t refuse: achieving assimilation. Arnold skillfully fuses distinct immigrant experiences with the supernatural to express a universally felt desire for belonging. Gabrielle desperately wants to fit in despite the xenophobia she experiences every day and despite making new, accepting friends in Mexican American Carmen and Rocky the talking rat-rabbit. But in trying to change herself, Gabrielle risks giving Lydia the power to conquer Brooklyn. Gabrielle is a charming narrator, and of course, good guy (girl) magic wins out in the end, but the threat to immigrant lives and identities is presented poignantly nonetheless in this richly imaginative origin story of one Haitian American girl that offers a fantastical take on immigrant narratives.
Pratchett-like worldbuilding centers immigrant kids in a story filled with culture, humor, and heart. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-27275-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Versify/HMH
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
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