Tackles highly sensitive subjects without the necessary care.
Almost a year after his sister Katie dies, Jude Banks turns himself in for her murder.
Jude is 12. Katie, less than a year younger, had been accelerated at school and started seventh grade alongside him. Before her death, the siblings were inseparable; afterward, Jude and his mother and father are awash with grief. Jude starts therapy and joins a sibling loss group where he makes friends with Clementine, who, like Jude, feels responsible for her sister’s death. Hood, whose own experience of tragic loss has informed some of her previous books, writes well, but she does not handle this subject matter appropriately for the target reading audience. The book slides back and forth unevenly in time, making it difficult for young readers to track Jude’s healing. Jude’s voice never sounds like that of a modern middle schooler—he’s alternately too innocent or too adult. His parents are one-dimensional. The book focuses relentlessly on awful details of grief, from Jude’s descriptively imagining his sister’s autopsy to a painful revelation about a baby that died to riffs on strange ways children have been killed. There is never any emotional let-up. Worst of all, when one character attempts suicide, several aspects of the narrative directly contraindicate best practices for safely discussing the topic in order to minimize the risk of suicide contagion. Many books have covered this subject matter well for this age group; young readers would do better elsewhere.
Tackles highly sensitive subjects without the necessary care. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-09407-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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