An enjoyable and diverse story highlighting friendship, entrepreneurship, and perseverance.
The Startup Squad discovers that selling merch for their favorite rock band is more complicated than it seems.
Harriet Nguyen lives life in the fast lane. She loves creating spectacular outfits every day, adores reptiles, and is the youngest of four siblings. She has three older brothers—Sam, Joe, and Larry—who are also in a band together called the Radical Skinks, named after their favorite reptile. When Harriet accidentally breaks Larry’s guitar and dooms the band, her friends quickly come up with a scheme to keep the band together and help them compete in Battle of the Bands. Together, the four middle schoolers come up with the idea of selling Radical Skinks T-shirts at a concert to raise money for a new guitar. Though the idea seems simple at first, the girls quickly realize they have underestimated how much effort and teamwork it will take to reach their goal, especially with Harriet’s act-first-think-later attitude, which results in disastrous mishaps. Filled with flawed characters and moments of growth, including lessons on trial and error, practicing customer service, and learning from mistakes, this drama-filled, fast-paced, entertaining read places friendship and hard work at its heart. The characters are cued as the following: Harriet and her family are Vietnamese, Amelia is white, Didi is South Asian, and Resa (the focus of series opener The Startup Squad, 2019) is Afro-Latinx. Practical tips on entrepreneurship and a Q&A with a kid entrepreneur appear in the backmatter.
An enjoyable and diverse story highlighting friendship, entrepreneurship, and perseverance. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-18045-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Imprint
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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