Though suffering from some craft problems, the novel stays afloat thanks to a winning protagonist and good pacing.
A light, mostly engaging middle-grade sports novel focused on the competitive world of synchronized swimming.
Katie Phillips is a pretty normal 13-year-old. She’s got great friends, a budding interest in boys, a jerk for an older brother, and overbearing parents that at least mean well—sometimes anyway. She also happens to be crazy about the unfairly maligned sport of synchronized swimming. Katie’s greatest desire is to be an Olympic synchronized swimmer, and she knows the first step to getting there is to make Nationals in her age group. Her parents, however, have other ideas about how she should be spending her time. Her father is relentless in pushing his children to pursue competitive race swimming, believing that an athletic scholarship is the only way they’ll be able to afford college. Katie increasingly feels the pressure as she tries to compete as a race swimmer, keep up in school, and pursue her dream. As obstacles begin to mount—injuries, bad grades, conflicting swim meets—she wonders if she’ll get a chance to show the world how good she is at synchronized swimming or if she’ll be forced to give up the thing she loves the most. Though his work is weighed down by some middle-of-the-road characterization and a tendency to repeat himself, debut novelist Firschein succeeds on some important fronts. Katie is a charming and relatable protagonist—even if she, like many other characters, is a little too good—and the narrative, following a familiar sports-story template, has good momentum. A few other issues—problems solving themselves and an extraneous steroid subplot—hold the book back, but the target audience of teenage swimmers is likely to find the novel a fun read.
Though suffering from some craft problems, the novel stays afloat thanks to a winning protagonist and good pacing.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Chapter Two Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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