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
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
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions.
An isolated class of misfits and a teacher on the edge of retirement are paired together for a year of (supposed) failure.
Zachary Kermit, a 55-year-old teacher, has been haunted for the last 27 years by a student cheating scandal that has earned him the derision of his colleagues and killed his teaching spirit. So when he is assigned to teach the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class—a dumping ground for “the Unteachables,” students with “behavior issues, learning problems, juvenile delinquents”—he is unfazed, as he is only a year away from early retirement. His relationship with his seven students—diverse in temperament, circumstance, and ability—will be one of “uncomfortable roommates” until June. But when Mr. Kermit unexpectedly stands up for a student, the kids of SCS-8 notice his sense of “justice and fairness.” Mr. Kermit finds he may even care a little about them, and they start to care back in their own way, turning a corner and bringing along a few ghosts from Mr. Kermit’s past. Writing in the alternating voices of Mr. Kermit, most of his students, and two administrators, Korman spins a narrative of redemption and belief in exceeding self-expectations. Naming conventions indicate characters of different ethnic backgrounds, but the book subscribes to a white default. The two students who do not narrate may be students of color, and their characterizations subtly—though arguably inadequately—demonstrate the danger of preconceptions.
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256388-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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