A fast-paced, intriguing, and surprising orphan story.
Fleeing an orphanage, 11-year-old Lucy finds a home with a traveling circus while searching for her older sister.
For the past five years, Lucy has lived at the Home for Friendless Children, where she stood out as an A student with a beautiful voice until chosen for special lessons with a “university lady.” Subjected to constant criticism and humiliation during these lessons, Lucy begins stuttering and eventually stops speaking. One day, when left unattended outside the orphanage fence, Lucy and three other orphans bolt, hitch a ride to Chicago, and connect with a sympathetic dwarf named Jabo, who works for Saachi’s Circus Spectacular. Under Jabo’s guidance, the three other children find apprenticeships with the circus, but no one will take Lucy on unless she speaks. Unaware the orphanage is desperately hunting for her and actively thwarting her sister’s efforts to find her, plucky Lucy must overcome her fear of speaking, earn a place with the circus, and connect with her sister while uncovering the sinister cause of her selective mutism. Set in 1939, Lucy’s dramatic story plays out against the disparate, but carefully researched and authentically rendered, environments of a bleak orphanage eager to exploit its wards and the colorful, dynamic, diverse circus world eager to welcome four homeless orphans (all evidently white). The author’s note reveals the horrifying reality that inspired Lucy’s story.
A fast-paced, intriguing, and surprising orphan story. (glossary) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-74255-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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