Still, Arie is a superbly appealing girl, and the details and encounters of her daily life offer a fine glimpse of a...
Life in a 1920s North Carolina mountain community is warmly detailed through letters 12-year-old Arie Mae Sparks writes to a cousin she’s never met.
Lonely despite her loving and dependable family, Arie longs for a real friend. She sets her sights on a visitor: Tom Wells from Baltimore, whose family is visiting the nearby settlement school as a work of mercy and cultural embassy. Arie boldly offers Tom just what he needs—an adventure—even as he gives Arie a sense of herself as storyteller. Dowell’s voice for Arie is bright, earnest and observant, and Arie’s mountain speech with its formal phrasing and different grammar is richly and sweetly conveyed. Dowell conveys a difficult way of life without pity. As Arie says of Harlan, the abandoned boy informally adopted by her parents, “You can’t help but admire a boy like that. Even when he’s just snuck under the table and tied your shoelaces to the table leg. You might clobber him but you stay filled with admiration all the same.” Traditional ways and new ones, well-off city folk and struggling, self-sufficient mountain people are shown in contrast, each changing the other. A passing reference to "a clutch of Indian squaws" is unfortunate.
Still, Arie is a superbly appealing girl, and the details and encounters of her daily life offer a fine glimpse of a particular time and place. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4424-3292-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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