A well-crafted, entertaining call for middle schoolers to find their voices and remain accountable in shaping their own...
Preteens Charlotte Lockard and Ben Boxer enjoy an ongoing online Scrabble feud, each vying for word-game domination, while they both silently struggle with middle school social catastrophes and crumbling family infrastructures.
Suddenly, their intermittent Scrabble banter becomes an unexpected lifeline. Pennsylvanian Charlotte’s rock collections, incessant anagramming, and deep-delving thought spirals charm readers instantly; Louisianan Ben’s sputtering, encyclopedic knowledge of presidential history, Ravenclaw blanket, relentless recycling statistics, and stick-to-it optimism couldn’t be sweeter. Guileless and earnest, these two kids seem poised for inevitable heartbreak. Charlotte can’t face her lifelong best friend, who suddenly thinks she’s a “parasite,” or her father, who’s recovering in the ICU after a heart attack. Ben can’t understand his parents’ marriage’s “devolution” into a divorce or the ridicule his student council campaign incites. Catastrophe looms and builds through the book, the reckoning of a single week that culminates with a crucial convergence of the Scrabble friends’ virtual world with their real one. Charlotte’s and Ben’s alternating first-person accounts of their humiliations and struggles induce a constricting tightness in readers’ chests. Their unspoken feelings and worries (which appear in quavering italics) weigh heavily. Readers will undoubtedly see themselves in these pages. Charlotte and Ben are both depicted with pale skin and dark hair on the cover; their respective ethnicities go unmentioned, and their supporting cast is a diverse one.
A well-crafted, entertaining call for middle schoolers to find their voices and remain accountable in shaping their own social spheres. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-241418-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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
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