A middle schooler unintentionally becomes complicit in cyberbullying.
Seventh grader Faith already feels uncomfortable at school, caught between a former friend, Tierra, who knows about her coding skills, and her popular new friends, Janelle and Adria. Then SlamBook, a social media version of the old-fashioned comment book, goes viral, and Faith’s first-person narration, driven by dialogue, chronicles its dangerous effects. At first only a few classmates are targeted and the comments seem harmless. When the comments turn vicious, ranging from body-shaming to racist attacks against Adria’s Filipinx background, Faith uses her coding skills to identify the offenders. (Faith and her other friends seem to be white.) And when she discovers that her once-friendly classmates are posting scathing remarks about one another under the cover of anonymity, she feels compelled to post her own biting comments. It’s a deserved revenge, and no one will know, right? And it’s not really cyberbullying as a poster suggests—or is it? Faith’s wavering sense of her culpability is spot-on realistic, as is one student’s anonymous threat of suicide after too many attacks. While readers can glean many lessons about the perils of social media, Faris never crosses into preachy territory, grounding characters in the tough decisions facing young girls today. In addition to Adria, Faith’s Asian coding mentor, Ms. Wang, brings further racial diversity to the story and acts as a welcome female STEM role model.
Readers will find this look at social media habits eye-opening and accessible. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-4520-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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BOOK REVIEW
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER
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