Centers on a cute, evergreen premise but suffers from minimal character development.
Some say that Christmas is the happiest time of year—but that’s not true for Jordan and Stevie Clementine.
The 10-year-old fraternal twins face yet another fractured holiday with not even a Christmas tree in sight. Their parents, born Billy Clement and Sam Valentine, dated briefly but never married and, as friends, have raised the girls, even taking on their melded last name. The sisters dream of a Christmas with all four Clementines together, singing carols and playing games, but musician Billy is on tour much of the year, and community center director Sam is especially busy with work around the holidays. The white-presenting girls spend each Christmas with their dad in the shabby family-owned motel, along with their uncle, aunt, and 15-year-old cousin (who ruined last Christmas by revealing the truth about Santa). This year, Stevie and Jordan hatch plans to get their parents to remember past happy Christmases and want to spend the holiday together. Fortuitously for the twins, a flood from a burst pipe at the local dog shelter brings dogs to the motel—leading cynophobic Billy and the girls to stay with Sam. The snowy, small-town Saskatchewan setting feels authentic, with many cultural details that add interest; however, the girls’ dual narrations are difficult to distinguish despite their opposite and rather one-note personalities and the supporting cast is similarly two-dimensional. Musician Quin’s solo debut, a series opener, features festive spot art by Ollerton.
Centers on a cute, evergreen premise but suffers from minimal character development. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9780374392345
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The journey is even gently funny—Omakayas’s brother spends much of the year with a porcupine on his head. Charming and...
This third entry in the Birchbark House series takes Omakayas and her family west from their home on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, away from land the U.S. government has claimed.
Difficulties abound; the unknown landscape is fraught with danger, and they are nearing hostile Bwaanag territory. Omakayas’s family is not only close, but growing: The travelers adopt two young chimookoman (white) orphans along the way. When treachery leaves them starving and alone in a northern Minnesota winter, it will take all of their abilities and love to survive. The heartwarming account of Omakayas’s year of travel explores her changing family relationships and culminates in her first moon, the onset of puberty. It would be understandable if this darkest-yet entry in Erdrich’s response to the Little House books were touched by bitterness, yet this gladdening story details Omakayas’s coming-of-age with appealing optimism.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-029787-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come.
Heroic deeds await Isaac after his little sister runs into the school basement and is captured by elves.
Even though their school is a spooky old castle transplanted stone by stone from Germany, Isaac and his two friends, Max and Emma, little suspect that an entire magical kingdom lies beneath—a kingdom run by elves, policed by oversized rats in uniform, and populated by captives who start out human but undergo transformative “weirding.” These revelations await Isaac and sidekicks as they nerve themselves to trail his bossy younger sib, Lily, through a shadowy storeroom and into a tunnel, across a wide lake, and into a city lit by half-human fireflies, where they are cast together into a dungeon. Can they escape before they themselves start changing? Gibson pits his doughty rescuers against such adversaries as an elven monarch who emits truly kingly belches and a once-human jailer with a self-picking nose. Tests of mettle range from a riddle contest to a face-off with the menacing head rat Shelfliver, and a helter-skelter chase finally leads rescuers and rescued back to the aboveground. Plainly, though, there is further rescuing to be done.
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62370-255-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
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