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
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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SEEN & HEARD
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