A boy has only a month before school starts to run friendship experiments in this illustrated children’s novel.
Maximilian Alexander McConk is 9.85 years old—he enjoys being precise—and is about to enter fourth grade. Although science makes sense to him, people don’t. Ever since preschool, his best friend Miguel has been the one who initiates conversations with other kids. Max isn’t shy all the time, but he’s self-conscious about not fitting in. Unlike most kids he meets, Max loves to read and gather facts, and he loves rhyming words. He also has a few other unusual quirks, such as wearing racing goggles and a cape, geocaching for fun, and taking banjo lessons. In sum, says Max, “Lonely + different + shy = YIKES!” After Miguel moves away, Max decides to use the scientific method to find new friend. He tries out several hypotheses, including changing his behavior in order to fit in with other kids, before eventually settling on just being himself. At first, his experiments at a nearby park end in tongue-tied embarrassment and flight, but he keeps trying. Max’s mother, referencing the “bee girl” in the music video for Blind Melon’s 1992 song “No Rain,” says that “you just need to find YOUR bees!” The advice eventually works, and Max celebrates his three new friends in rhyme: “I GET my new bros, and my new bros GET me, / and oh, by the way, one new bro is a SHE!” In her debut novel, author/illustrator Giles cleverly uses composition-notebook graphics to emphasize the science experiment format of the story. Max’s voice is believable, funny, and fresh—he sounds like he’d be a great kid to know. The book acknowledges, with compassion, how difficult it is for offbeat, shy kids to make friends, and it offers useful guidelines to “Finding YOUR Bees.” Its perspective on “fitting in” is also useful: “Just because I don’t fit IN doesn’t mean that I don’t fit somewhere.” The pleasingly jaunty illustrations depict a diverse group of kids with various skin tones; Max has “LOTS of curly black hair” and light brown skin.
A funny tale with great advice for those who “fit out,” not in.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948889-00-1
Page Count: 125
Publisher: Birch Books
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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