A compassionate, emotionally intelligent story about family and belonging that will resonate widely.
Two Black girls in Pasadena navigate the complexities of a newfound family relationship.
Eleven-year-old Liberty Perry has been a foster kid for as long as she can remember. After years of moving around to different households, she’s happy with her new foster mom, Joey, and Joey’s cat, Hansberry. When Liberty begins sixth grade at her 10th new school, Biddy Mason Community School, the last thing she expects is to meet her doppelgänger. Like Liberty, Kenya Norwood has dark skin and striking hazel eyes, but the similarities end with their physical resemblance—and the girls don’t get along. After they get into a fight, Kenya’s father, Wes, comes to school and recognizes Liberty as Kalilah, his missing daughter. A DNA test confirms this fact, unraveling the twins’ family history and posing a question of reunification that complicates Liberty’s recent, joyful acceptance of an invitation to be adopted by Joey. But the girls form a kinship bond despite their differences, and Kenya hatches a plan to make Joey and Wes fall in love so they can all stay together forever. The matchmaking schemes involve a luncheon, a Halloween trick-or-treat outing, a surprise Thanksgiving family dinner, and a camping trip, all leading up to a satisfying and realistic conclusion. The third-person perspective alternates between Liberty’s and Kenya’s points of view. Colbert sensitively and age-appropriately addresses complex issues around mental health, substance abuse, and the foster care system.
A compassionate, emotionally intelligent story about family and belonging that will resonate widely. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780063092488
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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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