Looks like a novel, or pieces of several, but fails to coalesce.
A parental challenge to one line in a fifth grade reading assignment gets an overwhelming response.
Interweaving three storylines connected by little beyond the timely issue under discussion, Levithan sets fifth graders Gideon White and Roberto Garcia on course to a tender and delicious (there is chocolate involved) love story. Fast-forward a generation to chronicle the upwelling of support humiliated young Donovan Johnson gets from his contemporary fifth grade class when his mom kicks off a formal challenge to an ambiguously worded passage—that may or may not signal romantic love between two boys—in an adventure novel their openly gay teacher has assigned (occasional melodramatic episodes from said novel, constituting the third strand in the book, are interspersed). Levithan’s book, which features passionate speeches and revelations before and at a packed school board meeting, comes across primarily as a platform for attitude modeling. It certainly succeeds as a manifesto to validate, amid much love and laughter, the rights of young people to seek, experiment with, and express their own identities. What is missing is a deeper exploration that goes beyond character types to present a unified story that discusses these critical subjects through nuanced engagement and growth. The cast reads as White except for Roberto, who is Latinx.
Looks like a novel, or pieces of several, but fails to coalesce. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48468-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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