A beautifully executed, character-driven tale of family, courage, resilience, and the meaning of what is right.
Latine seventh grader Wendy Celestina Toledo loves outer space, but she’s worried about things happening right here on Earth.
After a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on her community leads to disappearances of several people she knows, including her best friend, Wendy and her Salvadoran-Guatemalan family move to a new neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. Aspiring astronomer Wendy enters a school for gifted and talented students, makes a diverse group of new friends, and sets her sights on building a telescope and winning the science fair. However, with ICE vans patrolling the streets and a woman named Luz claiming sanctuary in the church down the street, her parents are fearful. Not only are Wendy and her friends enduring racist bullying at school, but someone Wendy loves is seriously threatened, and she must tap into her own inner resources to do what’s right for herself and those she cares for. The stakes start out high but manage to continue to build throughout the story, culminating in an unexpected plot twist. Heavy topics like bullying, familial hardship, and academic pressures are explored in ways middle-grade readers will understand and are grounded in well-rounded characterization. Readers will resonate with the characters’ three-dimensional personalities regardless of their and their families’ own immigration experiences.
A beautifully executed, character-driven tale of family, courage, resilience, and the meaning of what is right. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780063255487
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
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
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