A refreshingly original high-interest, low-grit video game story.
A beloved video game leads to new friends for a girl who’s just switched schools.
When Chell (with “a hard sound, as in ‘chair,’” thank you very much) Park gets called to Principal Gupta’s office, she can’t help but take the opportunity to play a round of Soapbox Derby while she waits. Three nearby kids take an interest in what she’s doing: injured athlete Mario Delgado, who’s cued Latine, Josh Bard, a “vampire pale” boy with hearing aids, and Alyx Achebe, whose Black-presenting family founded a successful baked-goods franchise. The four connect online and decide to start their school’s first esports team. Chell forges ahead, though she knows her mom would never agree; she was named after a character from her unemployed father’s favorite video game, and his gaming (which got him fired and which he often prioritizes over his daughter) is a source of conflict between her separated parents. Chell’s deception is bound to catch up to her, but the four seventh graders secure a faculty sponsor and try out for an exciting tournament, all the while growing closer and opening up to one another. Exciting gaming scenes accompany gentle, emotional explorations of telling the truth even in the face of undesirable consequences. Chell is implied biracial, with a Korean American dad and a mom who reads white.
A refreshingly original high-interest, low-grit video game story. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781645952688
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pixel+Ink
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
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