The book doesn’t dwell long enough on the smallest moments, but each of them feels like meeting the baseball legend—and...
Brooklyn Dodgers fan Steve’s life is changed when Jackie Robinson and his family move into his Jewish neighborhood in 1948.
This is a true story—parts of it, anyway. The author is Robinson’s daughter, and the main character was her family’s neighbor in real life. Stephen Satlow was a baseball fan, and he lived two doors down from his hero. The author has changed some details (one character is a composite), but readers may find themselves hoping every word is accurate. The Jackie Robinson in the book seems just as kind and thoughtful as the real Jackie sounded in interviews and news stories. When 8-year-old narrator Steve is having a rough time at school, Jackie walks over to the school softball game and teaches the whole team about stealing bases. There isn’t much conflict here. The story is just as down-to-earth and remarkable as the actual baseball star, and it would feel mean-spirited to wish any more drama on these two genuinely endearing people. Absent drama to drive the plot, the book’s main fault is that it doesn’t make enough of the magical everyday moments. A scene of Jackie and Steve playing stoopball could have lasted pages longer. Jackie’s son, Jackie Junior, is hardly a character here, another missed opportunity.
The book doesn’t dwell long enough on the smallest moments, but each of them feels like meeting the baseball legend—and maybe, sometimes, even better than the real thing. (historical note, photos) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-80451-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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