A heartfelt story highlighting activism and showing how change does not come easily.
Can middle schoolers save the environment and the world?
When 12-year-old Mimi Laskaris moves to a small island in Florida with her family, she is immediately taken with the beach and shells. But she quickly notices problems: plastic bags caught in trees and litter washed up on the beach. After learning about Melati and Isabel Wijsen, sisters who started a movement to ban single-use plastic bags in their home of Bali, Mimi decides to try to do the same in her new community. She becomes absorbed in organizing and gathering signatures for a petition, though she also worries about what her classmates might think. As Mimi’s continued activism causes strain in her new friendships and affects her grades, her parents notice that her piano practice has been neglected. Mimi does want to focus on school and piano, but how can she when she can’t get enough signatures for her petition? This novel in verse explores environmental concerns many young people today have and shows how change can be made close to home. Mimi is Greek American, and other students from her new and old schools are cued as ethnically diverse. Dimopoulos gives some examples of the international nature of the youth climate justice movement in the text and supplementary notes; a foreword by Melati Wijsen adds a special touch.
A heartfelt story highlighting activism and showing how change does not come easily. (author’s note, timeline, activist profiles, resources, scientist interview, bibliography) (Verse novel. 8-12)Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-53815-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message.
Two boys equally blessed with both talent and ego vie for supremacy in their school’s annual “creative storytelling competition.”
J is “by far the best artist in the entire fifth grade”; K has “become known as the best writer in the entire fifth grade.” Naturally, each one is determined to crush it in The Contest, and each decides an illustrated story is the way to go. The competitive boys try to undermine one another by passing along fake tips for success, each hoping to destroy his opponent’s story. K advises J to “write what you DON’T know” and to use sixth-person narration. “J’s Secrets to Drawing Really Good” are just as catastrophic and include drawing with your nondominant hand and inserting mistakes to keep readers engaged. Creative hijinks ensue. Craft and Alexander have become known on social media for the jocular trash talk they heap on each other; J and K are their fictional child avatars. As an internet bit doled out in small doses, their frenemy-ship is amusing; as a sustained story about storytelling, it’s thin on both character and plot development. Authorial interjections exhort readers to look up 75-cent vocabulary, often used in barbs directed at each other; the latter feel like in-jokes more than playful attempts to engage young readers. Kids may enjoy spotting references to popular children’s authors among the characters’ names, and budding authors and illustrators will benefit from the advice. J and K are both Black; their classmates and teachers are racially diverse.
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780316582681
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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