An engaging, textured, and deeply humane coming-of-age novel.
In 1941, against the backdrop of turbulent world events, life unfolds in a tightknit, largely Quaker farming community where friends and family are one and the same.
Precocious, math-brained Peggy Mott, a Methodist 12-year-old who presents white, is the youngest student entering high school in rural West Branch, Iowa. Peggy is grappling with best friend Delia’s leukemia diagnosis, a first crush (on 16-year-old German Jewish refugee Gunther), a first dance, and changing relationships with friends and family. Refugees from Europe, mostly Jewish, have been staying at the nearby Scattergood Hostel, which is run by Quakers. Bouwman paints a rich, detailed landscape, from mundane farm chores to deeply layered explorations of characters and relationships. Peggy’s astute and observant first-person narrative captures her personal journey as she struggles with self-awareness, stages of grief, and her changing perspective as she’s exposed to the greater complexities of the world. Equal parts tender and heartwarming and tragically heartbreaking, this story, which will appeal to fans of Lauren Wolk, also offers a realistic depiction of marriage, showing compromises, challenges, and the different ways people care for and love each other. Readers will become deeply invested in the fully developed characters—each flawed and human but doing their best, Peggy included. The power of stories to connect people with others, bear witness, and create joy is an interwoven theme running throughout the text.
An engaging, textured, and deeply humane coming-of-age novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780823457755
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read.
Will a bully always be a bully?
That’s the question eighth-grade football captain Chase Ambrose has to answer for himself after a fall from his roof leaves him with no memory of who and what he was. When he returns to Hiawassee Middle School, everything and everyone is new. The football players can hardly wait for him to come back to lead the team. Two, Bear Bratsky and Aaron Hakimian, seem to be special friends, but he’s not sure what they share. Other classmates seem fearful; he doesn’t know why. Temporarily barred from football because of his concussion, he finds a new home in the video club and, over time, develops a new reputation. He shoots videos with former bullying target Brendan Espinoza and even with Shoshanna Weber, who’d hated him passionately for persecuting her twin brother, Joel. Chase voluntarily continues visiting the nursing home where he’d been ordered to do community service before his fall, making a special friend of a decorated Korean War veteran. As his memories slowly return and he begins to piece together his former life, he’s appalled. His crimes were worse than bullying. Will he become that kind of person again? Set in the present day and told in the alternating voices of Chase and several classmates, this finding-your-middle-school-identity story explores provocative territory. Aside from naming conventions, the book subscribes to the white default.
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read. (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-338-05377-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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