A funny, compassionate tale.
Future entrepreneur Cleo, unlike most fifth-graders, has her career path laid out; a new school assignment gives her the opportunity to jump-start her plans.
Cleo’s effervescent and upbeat, full of creative business ideas she tends to execute before securing the proper approvals from her loving adoptive parents. She counts on her best friend, Caylee Ortega, a born organizer, to make her ideas workable. Cleo’s not all about the money. Her role model is an inspirational entrepreneur/celebrity with heart who advocates giving back to the community. Cleo secretly fantasizes she is her real birth mother, not the African-American–Filipino birth mother who gave Cleo her name, baby clothes, and stuffed toy, Beary, but has avoided contact. It’s different for Cleo’s little brothers. Their birth mother visits regularly and brings presents—even for Cleo. Canceling the dreaded fifth-grade family-tree project (creating and displaying their family trees is tough for kids with complex or difficult histories), her teacher assigns passion projects, encouraging students to explore their interests in depth. Cleo’s passion is business; her project, removing her classmates’ loose baby teeth with a Nerf gun. (Adults and even some kids will wonder how her otherwise responsible parents and teacher give even limited permission for this.) Frazier offers a rare, cleareyed view of adoption, understanding that even the best are founded on loss as well as love and that assimilating this bittersweet, difficult truth is a lifelong journey.
A funny, compassionate tale. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-82235-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Levine/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cleverly structured and sweetly engaging.
A 13-year-old embarks on a cross-country road trip with his famous grandfather.
Grief-stricken middle schooler Gonzalo Alberto Sánchez García’s summer is off to a rocky start. He feels like he’s in a fog, he can’t stop drawing monsters against photos of landscapes on his iPad, and he’s stuck visiting his cranky, standoffish abuelo in Mendocino, California. Gonzalo’s Cuban grandfather is the renowned but reclusive fantasy author behind a “billion-dollar book-and-movie franchise” run by Gonzalo’s mother. Though generally reluctant to promote his work, Abuelo agrees to a tour for the release of the last book in the bestselling series. But he turns the tour into a journey to visit old friends and share his own wounds with Gonzalo in an attempt to help them both heal from the traumas they’ve suffered. Indeed, Abuelo’s plan proves poignantly effective as both he and Gonzalo slowly open up to each other and to all the joy still to be found in the world around them. Cartaya peppers Gonzalo’s first-person narrative with chapters voiced by an omniscient first-person narrator who breaks the fourth wall, directly addressing readers with plot recaps and commentary. While the narrator’s interruptions risk jarring readers out of the story’s flow, the shifts in perspective are charmingly and humorously executed, may support reading comprehension, and further the overarching bookish themes, since the story both revolves around a fictional book series and follows main character Gonzalo’s transformation into the hero of his own story.
Cleverly structured and sweetly engaging. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780451479754
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kokila
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A vibrant celebration of art’s power to console and heal.
Zora, 12, shares her mother’s artistic gifts, but when grief and guilt lead her to destroy years of drawings, the results are astonishing.
Voom is Zora and her mom’s word for the artistic impulse that bubbles up inside. After disclosing her leukemia diagnosis to Zora and her sister, Frankie, Mom promised the girls she’d beat it. Ten months later, their far sicker mom is hospitalized in Pittsburgh, where the girls share their bus driver grandmother’s basement apartment. Mom continues to be optimistic and avoid acknowledging the possibility of death. Frustrated and needing to hear a realistic prognosis, Zora uses her art to show her mother the truth of how ill she looks. Later that night her mom dies—and Zora’s Voom goes away. When Grandma Wren disappoints Frankie on her seventh birthday, Zora’s guilt-fueled anger erupts. Over Frankie’s protests, Zora scribbles out her drawings until the scribbles fight back, pulling the girls into Pencilvania, a world where each of Zora’s creations lives. Most of her now-animated drawings welcome her—except for one scribbled-out horse who kidnaps Frankie. Guided by a seven-legged horse, the Zoracle (a composite of her early self-portraits), and other charming creations, Zora sets out to rescue Frankie and rediscover the wellspring of creativity that forms her mother’s legacy. Presumed White, the humans are well rounded and believable. Pencilvania’s inhabitants, conceived with humorous, metafictional whimsy, are enlivened with copious, inventive illustrations.
A vibrant celebration of art’s power to console and heal. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-72821-590-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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