A thoughtful exploration of grief, family lore, and human connection.
Juniper Creedy and her friends embark on a desperate quest after her older brother goes missing in action in Afghanistan.
Juni has always known that her family, descended from the Brothers Grimm, is cursed: According to her grandmother Anya, the family’s extreme luck—both good and bad—comes from an encounter their famous ancestors had with a Greek witch. But despite her own brushes with fate, including lifelong asthma attacks, the curse doesn’t feel real to Juni until the Army delivers the news that Connor is missing. Now, her parents are distant and unreceptive to Juni’s conviction that Connor is still alive, but Anya shares new information with Juni, partly through first-person journal entries, about her own childhood and the curse. So when it’s time for the annual end-of-summer camping trip with her friends Mason and Gabby (chaperoned by Luca, Gabby’s older brother and Connor’s best friend), Juni requests a few additional stops in hopes of finding a witch and breaking the curse. Holczer’s clear, gentle prose allows the emotional and descriptive elements of the text to shine in this multilayered road-trip story, complete with flashbacks at key landmarks. While Juni’s Grimm ancestry isn’t critical to the plot, it underscores her faith in the fairy-tale elements that ultimately enable catharsis around Connor’s fate. Most characters are coded White; Gabby and Luca’s family is cued as Latinx.
A thoughtful exploration of grief, family lore, and human connection. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984813-99-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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