An engaging portrait of two children’s world before they became famous.
The friendship of Nelle Harper Lee and Truman Capote, inspiration for Scout and Dill in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, is fictionalized in “a flavorful bowl of southern homestyle yarns.”
A girl dressed like a boy and a boy dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy meet and become fast friends in Monroeville, Alabama, “sometime in the Great Depression.” They contrive adventures to spice up life in Monroeville, and their stories add up to a fine re-creation of small-town Southern life. Young readers will enjoy Nelle and Tru’s treehouse, adventure at the courthouse, their brush with the Ku Klux Klan, Nelle’s father, Amasa Coleman Lee, staring down the Grand Dragon, and reclusive spooky neighbor Sonny Boular firing their imaginations. Older readers, including all of the teachers of the classic novel, will see in these childhood adventures the makings of To Kill a Mockingbird, and the author’s note adds helpful information and mentions Go Set a Watchman without getting into the intricate relationship of that novel to its famous offspring. Since Nelle and Tru loved writing stories, Neri even includes “reimagined” short stories from Nelle’s and Tru’s lives. The charming and elegantly written novel doesn’t shy away from issues of mental illness, child abandonment, and racism, but they are woven neatly into the fabric of the characters’ lives in the tiny Southern town.
An engaging portrait of two children’s world before they became famous. (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-69960-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato.
The new kid in school endures becoming the school mascot.
Ben Hardy has never cared for potatoes, and this distaste has become a barrier to adjusting to life in his new Idaho town. His school’s mascot is the Spud, and after a series of misfortunes, Ben is enlisted to don the potato costume and cheer on his school’s team. Ben balances his duties as a life-sized potato against his desperate desire to hide the fact that he’s the dork in the suit. After all, his cute new crush, Jayla, wouldn’t be too impressed to discover Ben’s secret. The ensuing novel is a fairly boilerplate middle–grade narrative: snarky tween protagonist, the crush that isn’t quite what she seems, and a pair of best friends that have more going on than our hero initially believes. The author keeps the novel moving quickly, pushing forward with witty asides and narrative momentum so fast that readers won’t really mind that the plot’s spine is one they’ve encountered many times before. Once finished, readers will feel little resonance and move on to the next book in their to-read piles, but in the moment the novel is pleasant enough. Ben, Jayla, and Ben’s friend Hunter are white while Ellie, Ben’s other good pal, is Latina.
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-11866-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A solid debut: fluent, funny and eminently sequel-worthy.
Inventively tweaking a popular premise, Jensen pits two Incredibles-style families with superpowers against each other—until a new challenge rises to unite them.
The Johnsons invariably spit at the mere mention of their hated rivals, the Baileys. Likewise, all Baileys habitually shake their fists when referring to the Johnsons. Having long looked forward to getting a superpower so that he too can battle his clan’s nemeses, Rafter Bailey is devastated when, instead of being able to fly or something else cool, he acquires the “power” to strike a match on soft polyester. But when hated classmate Juanita Johnson turns up newly endowed with a similarly bogus power and, against all family tradition, they compare notes, it becomes clear that something fishy is going on. Both families regard themselves as the heroes and their rivals as the villains. Someone has been inciting them to fight each other. Worse yet, that someone has apparently developed a device that turns real superpowers into silly ones. Teaching themselves on the fly how to get past their prejudice and work together, Rafter, his little brother, Benny, and Juanita follow a well-laid-out chain of clues and deductions to the climactic discovery of a third, genuinely nefarious family, the Joneses, and a fiendishly clever scheme to dispose of all the Baileys and Johnsons at once. Can they carry the day?
A solid debut: fluent, funny and eminently sequel-worthy. (Adventure. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-220961-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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