A light fantasy with a powerful message of hope.
A young girl who wants nothing more than to fit in with her classmates learns to stand out instead.
Włodzimira—Mira for short—is the “least-athletic girl” and shortest person in her fifth grade class. She’s also the only one who breaks a sweat when doing physical activity, and it’s because everyone else in her class takes Amber: a magical substance that essentially makes people stronger, healthier, and smarter. Only citizens of Amberland have access to Amber rations, and the government is strict regarding whom they let cross their borders. Just when narrator Mira and her family finally become citizens, news of Amber’s dwindling supply weaves panic into the community, causing protests and hate crimes. Staniszewski writes a fluid first-person narrative, providing valuable insight on Mira’s thoughts and feelings regarding how she’s seen as an outsider by her classmates and hopes for a better life in Amberland. While the worldbuilding feels thin at times, the magical aspects of the story are well balanced with the realistic issues tackled such as bullying and immigration laws. Naming conventions cue ethnicity in this analog America, which seems to be as diverse as the real one; Mira and her family are presumed Polish.
A light fantasy with a powerful message of hope. (author’s note) (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-4278-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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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