Transporting.
A novel in verse about the months before a city girl starts middle school.
It’s the summer before Phoebe, 11, enters Southside Middle. Everyone says they’ll “eat her alive” when she gets there. On Phee’s street there’s an alley where the neighborhood kids hang out—and a house with a “killer dog” named Bull. She thinks some of the kids are too babyish, while others have in turn outgrown her. With palpable angst, Phee wrestles hard with wanting to break free of the alley and see more of the world, yet she fears the unknown. When cool and prickly Mercy arrives to visit her dad, Phee’s eager to befriend her, excited about the chance to try out her skateboard, and she turns away from lifelong buddy Henny. The poetry skips across the page: Phee is a deeply relatable wordsmith, thinking in rhythms that capture the patterns of hopscotch and skipping rope, and expressing raw, conflicting emotions. Words flow across the page, punctuated by repetition, movement, empty space, and run-on words. The poems transform the alley into a character, showing both its smallness and the new experiences it offers as Phee journals about it in her treetop hideaway. The voices of the characters, brief though they may be, jump off the page with clarity as Ylvisaker captures the alchemy of ordinary youthful times filled with friends and fears. The characters have minimal physical descriptions; the cover art depicts Phee and Mercy as white.
Transporting. (Verse fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781958325124
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Marble Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message.
Two boys equally blessed with both talent and ego vie for supremacy in their school’s annual “creative storytelling competition.”
J is “by far the best artist in the entire fifth grade”; K has “become known as the best writer in the entire fifth grade.” Naturally, each one is determined to crush it in The Contest, and each decides an illustrated story is the way to go. The competitive boys try to undermine one another by passing along fake tips for success, each hoping to destroy his opponent’s story. K advises J to “write what you DON’T know” and to use sixth-person narration. “J’s Secrets to Drawing Really Good” are just as catastrophic and include drawing with your nondominant hand and inserting mistakes to keep readers engaged. Creative hijinks ensue. Craft and Alexander have become known on social media for the jocular trash talk they heap on each other; J and K are their fictional child avatars. As an internet bit doled out in small doses, their frenemy-ship is amusing; as a sustained story about storytelling, it’s thin on both character and plot development. Authorial interjections exhort readers to look up 75-cent vocabulary, often used in barbs directed at each other; the latter feel like in-jokes more than playful attempts to engage young readers. Kids may enjoy spotting references to popular children’s authors among the characters’ names, and budding authors and illustrators will benefit from the advice. J and K are both Black; their classmates and teachers are racially diverse.
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780316582681
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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