The educational possibilities will appeal to parents and teachers, and the hint of Greg Heffley will draw young readers in.
Vicente (The Case of the Three Kings/El caso de los Reyes Magos, 2016, etc.) invites readers to experience the daily life of an elementary school anti-bully vigilante in this quirky bilingual tale.
Puerto Rican fourth-grader Lance García is Mister Malo, mysterious recipient of “Malo Mail” and defender of the bullied who ask for his help. His current mission involves an innocent falsely accused of farting. Lance, who knows what it’s like to be bullied, must strategize the best course of action and in so doing learns a little something about how everyone has their own complex history and motivations. Lance is endearingly earnest, and Vicente does a great job of focusing on kid priorities, but the writing is clumsy, sentimental, and heavy-handed, containing more message than story and certainly not enough Mister Malo shenanigans. The book doesn’t deliver on the promise of its first chapter, meandering from scene to scene with little tension and uneven success. Still, the bilingual element is unusual and fills a gap. And while the book is only vaguely Puerto Rican in texture, that very lack of focus serves to present Latinx experience in a matter-of-fact and open way.
The educational possibilities will appeal to parents and teachers, and the hint of Greg Heffley will draw young readers in. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55885-853-4
Page Count: 115
Publisher: Piñata Books/Arte Público
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2017
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
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