An average tale that’s most likely to appeal to female grade schoolers who might yet believe that this is an accurate...
Seventh-grader Emma Woods decides to start an advice blog at school since she’s already adept at meddling.
Surprisingly, her teachers are fully supportive, putting the blog on the school website. At first there’s little interest from fellow students at Austen Middle School (the references will fly over the heads of the audience). After she intervenes with a Spanish teacher to make his classroom management fairer and tries to move a clock forward to end gym class early, however, Emma begins to earn a reputation as an effective mediator, and interest in her blog—as well as push back—picks up. A series of nasty, bullying comments posted on it gives her the opportunity to launch a clever (and a bit didactic if worthwhile) anti-cyberbullying campaign. Convenience plays a heavy role. Teachers and the school principal don’t seem to mind her interventions. In a world that’s unrealistically convivial, annoyed classmates manage to eventually forgive her failed, sometimes blundering attempts to fix just about everything. Even the disgruntled bully lurks fully offstage, their identity remaining a complete mystery, with the likeliest potential candidates eliminated and the bullying neatly ending as well. But the text is brief and Emma makes a mostly perky and somewhat attractive protagonist, even if she occupies a vanilla-flavored, default-white world, in this first in a series. It remains to be seen whether subsequent volumes will likewise clap back to Jane Austen.
An average tale that’s most likely to appeal to female grade schoolers who might yet believe that this is an accurate depiction of middle school. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4998-0647-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yellow Jacket
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Certain to elicit both gales of giggles and winces of sympathy (not to mention recognition) from young readers.
First volume of a planned three, this edited version of an ongoing online serial records a middle-school everykid’s triumphs and (more often) tribulations through the course of a school year.
Largely through his own fault, mishaps seem to plague Greg at every turn, from the minor freak-outs of finding himself permanently seated in class between two pierced stoners and then being saddled with his mom for a substitute teacher, to being forced to wrestle in gym with a weird classmate who has invited him to view his “secret freckle.” Presented in a mix of legible “hand-lettered” text and lots of simple cartoon illustrations with the punch lines often in dialogue balloons, Greg’s escapades, unwavering self-interest and sardonic commentary are a hoot and a half.
Certain to elicit both gales of giggles and winces of sympathy (not to mention recognition) from young readers. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8109-9313-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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SEEN & HEARD
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