To fulfill a school project, an 11-year-old boy starts a sled dog school with unexpected results.
Matt lives off the grid in Michigan with his parents and younger sister and wishes his family were more mainstream. His stay-at-home father knits and does pottery, and Matt is derisively called “Smokey” by his classmates for his woodstove-smoke smell. Matt is also doing poorly in math class even though he solves practical problems easily outside of school. One thing Matt does love about his life is the sled dogs his family raises and runs. For a school extra-credit project designed to teach business and accounting skills, Matt starts Sled Dog School. His two clients, both about his age, have vastly differing abilities and personalities. Tubbs, blithely uncoordinated, nonetheless has an enthusiastic personality, and his approbation of Matt’s family life makes Matt begin to see it with more appreciative eyes. Overachiever Alex is intelligent and naturally adept, but she is condescending—until a crisis brings all three together. Themes of friendship and problem-solving are slipped effortlessly into the funny and fresh plot, and authentic off-the-grid details bring the story to life. Everyone in the story appears to be white.
A tale of loyalty and friendship—with a strong dose of validation for readers who learn from doing rather than books—that hits all the right notes. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-87331-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Categories: CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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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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This pitch-perfect contemporary novel gently explores the past’s repercussions on the present
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Eleven-year-old Brooklynite Genie has “worry issues,” so when he and his older brother, Ernie, are sent to Virginia to spend a month with their estranged grandparents while their parents “try to figure it all out,” he goes into overdrive.
First, he discovers that Grandpop is blind. Next, there’s no Internet, so the questions he keeps track of in his notebook (over 400 so far) will have to go un-Googled. Then, he breaks the model truck that’s one of the only things Grandma still has of his deceased uncle. And he and Ernie will have to do chores, like picking peas and scooping dog poop. What’s behind the “nunya bidness door”? And is that a gun sticking out from Grandpop’s waistband? Reynolds’ middle-grade debut meanders like the best kind of summer vacation but never loses sense of its throughline. The richly voiced third-person narrative, tightly focused through Genie’s point of view, introduces both brothers and readers to this rural African-American community and allows them to relax and explore even as it delves into the many mysteries that so bedevil Genie, ranging from "Grits? What exactly are they?" to, heartbreakingly, “Why am I so stupid?” Reynolds gives his readers uncommonly well-developed, complex characters, especially the completely believable Genie and Grandpop, whose stubborn self-sufficiency belies his vulnerability and whose flawed love both Genie and readers will cherish.
This pitch-perfect contemporary novel gently explores the past’s repercussions on the present . (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1590-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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