A funny tale with great advice for those who “fit out,” not in.
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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