Seventh-grader Joanna Giordano is great at hockey, but the only way she can play in her school is on the boys’ team, a fact that doesn’t sit well with everyone. Even Ben, Joanna’s long-time best friend, is leery. She tries out for the team and makes it. This creates more problems with the bully of a teammate; a vixen classmate; and even Ben, who also makes the cut. The bully tries to sabotage Joanna on the ice, and Ben seems to be pulling away from her. When Joanna’s winning goal crushes an opposing team, she earns some grudging respect. Her waning friendship with Ben continues to raise concern, but all ends well, though the author offers no easy solutions to all Joanna’s problems. FitzGerald provides humor and has a good ear for the way teens really speak and act, so the kids come off as realistic and familiar. Subplots point out hassles Joanna faces at home. Joanna’s relatable, feisty and stands up for herself. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59643-044-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sixth-grader and an inexperienced teacher both learn something from each other in Clements’s newest teachable-moment-driven school tale. Hart Evans has always, and effortlessly, been Cool—a talent that backfires when his control-freak music teacher, Mr. Meinert, throws up his hands and leaves it to the unruly school chorus to elect its own director for the upcoming Holiday Concert. Hart surprises both Mr. Meinert and himself by rising brilliantly to the occasion. Clements stirs a few side issues into the pot—for one, Meinert and the other arts teachers are being laid off on January first—but his focus being Hart’s introduction to group dynamics and the management thereof, complications of plot or character cause only minor ripples. Having learned the value of listening, of running things democratically, and of knowing when to seek help, Hart and Meinert engineer a quirky, rousing triumph—that, no, doesn’t save Meinert’s job, but does leave everyone involved, readers included, with both good feelings and the idea that both young people and adults are sometimes guilty of underestimating each other. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-689-84516-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
Who is next in the ocean food chain? Pallotta has a surprising answer in this picture book glimpse of one curious boy. Danny, fascinated by plankton, takes his dory and rows out into the ocean, where he sees shrimp eating those plankton, fish sand eels eating shrimp, mackerel eating fish sand eels, bluefish chasing mackerel, tuna after bluefish, and killer whales after tuna. When an enormous humpbacked whale arrives on the scene, Danny’s dory tips over and he has to swim for a large rock or become—he worries’someone’s lunch. Surreal acrylic illustrations in vivid blues and red extend the story of a small boy, a small boat, and a vast ocean, in which the laws of the food chain are paramount. That the boy has been bathtub-bound during this entire imaginative foray doesn’t diminish the suspense, and the facts Pallotta presents are solidly researched. A charming fish tale about the one—the boy—that got away. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88106-075-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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