A coming-of-age story blossoming with tender honesty and hope.
A girl with a green thumb uproots herself from her isolated island home in search of a rare plant to cure her dying papa.
Twelve years ago, the Orange Boat (which hasn’t carried oranges since the Great Soil Blight) brought an unexpected delivery to Earth’s End, a forgotten corner of the Gardenia Isles. Neither of Henna’s papas expected to receive a baby in the mail. Henna knows all about her family’s story, and she thought she knew everything about Papa Niall and Papa Joaquim too until she discovers seasonal allergies aren’t what’s making Papa Niall sick this year but the resurgence of a terminal illness. Determined to save him, Henna embarks on a secret mission at St. Basil’s Conservatory, an elite horticulture boarding school where she hopes to find and steal from a heavily guarded repository the last remaining seeds of the nightwalker, a plant rumored to produce a miracle healing elixir. Humor and a suspenseful adventure balance the sensitive, aching exploration of loss. Sun-bronzed, dark-haired Henna lives in a racially diverse world. Henna; her genderfluid friend, P; and their roommate, Lora, who uses a wheelchair for mobility, face various barriers of accessibility at the school. Each of them has their own goals, but they learn to affirm and ally with one another to challenge injustice. Dairman’s careful use of details sets up an emotionally fulfilling, bittersweet resolution.
A coming-of-age story blossoming with tender honesty and hope. (author’s note) (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-5362-2480-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Entrancing and uplifting.
A small dog, the elderly woman who owns him, and a homeless girl come together to create a tale of serendipity.
Piper, almost 12, her parents, and her younger brother are at the bottom of a long slide toward homelessness. Finally in a family shelter, Piper finds that her newfound safety gives her the opportunity to reach out to someone who needs help even more. Jewel, mentally ill, lives in the park with her dog, Baby. Unwilling to leave her pet, and forbidden to enter the shelter with him, she struggles with the winter weather. Ree, also homeless and with a large dog, helps when she can, but after Jewel gets sick and is hospitalized, Baby’s taken to the animal shelter, and Ree can’t manage the complex issues alone. It’s Piper, using her best investigative skills, who figures out Jewel’s backstory. Still, she needs all the help of the shelter Firefly Girls troop that she joins to achieve her accomplishment: to raise enough money to provide Jewel and Baby with a secure, hopeful future and, maybe, with their kindness, to inspire a happier story for Ree. Told in the authentic alternating voices of loving child and loyal dog, this tale could easily slump into a syrupy melodrama, but Pyron lets her well-drawn characters earn their believable happy ending, step by challenging step, by reaching out and working together. Piper, her family, and Jewel present white; Pyron uses hair and naming convention, respectively, to cue Ree as black and Piper’s friend Gabriela as Latinx.
Entrancing and uplifting. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283922-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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