Readers with a hankering for a modern, Midwest animal tale could do worse.
Eleven-year-old Princess desperately wants a pet, but her father says animals on a farm must earn their keep.
With her dad away in Iraq, her mother busy with work and her older half-sister Monica busy being 16, “P” (which she prefers over Princess) tries to make the cow-herding dog Blackie a pet, but he won’t listen to her. When Blackie kills a possum, P finds it was a mother and adopts the surviving baby despite her father’s rule. With the help of her best friend Mart, P keeps “Ike” a secret from teachers and family while trying to teach him to be a wild possum (since her wounded father will be home soon). With rabies running rampant in the Oklahoma countryside and catastrophes coming fast and furious, can P do right by her charge and keep the farm ready for her father’s return? Blom’s debut is a run-of-the-mill wild-animal–as-pet tale, though the deployed-father element makes it plenty relevant today. There’s a slight disconnect between the vocabulary used to relate this folksy story and the first-person narrator’s difficulties in school and with letter writing, but P is a feisty, honest country gal.
Readers with a hankering for a modern, Midwest animal tale could do worse. (Fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2331-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
The journey is even gently funny—Omakayas’s brother spends much of the year with a porcupine on his head. Charming and...
This third entry in the Birchbark House series takes Omakayas and her family west from their home on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, away from land the U.S. government has claimed.
Difficulties abound; the unknown landscape is fraught with danger, and they are nearing hostile Bwaanag territory. Omakayas’s family is not only close, but growing: The travelers adopt two young chimookoman (white) orphans along the way. When treachery leaves them starving and alone in a northern Minnesota winter, it will take all of their abilities and love to survive. The heartwarming account of Omakayas’s year of travel explores her changing family relationships and culminates in her first moon, the onset of puberty. It would be understandable if this darkest-yet entry in Erdrich’s response to the Little House books were touched by bitterness, yet this gladdening story details Omakayas’s coming-of-age with appealing optimism.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-029787-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
A dramatic, educational, authentic whale of a tale.
After a tsunami devastates their habitat in the Salish Sea, a young orca and her brother embark on a remarkable adventure.
Vega’s matriarchal family expects her to become a hunter and wayfinder, with her younger brother, Deneb, protecting and supporting her. Invited to guide her family to their Gathering Place to hunt salmon, Vega’s underwater miscalculations endanger them all, and an embarrassed Vega questions whether she should be a wayfinder. When the baby sister she hoped would become her life companion is stillborn, a distraught Vega carries the baby away to a special resting place, shocking her grieving family. Dispatched to find his missing sister, Deneb locates Vega in the midst of a terrible tsunami. To escape the waters polluted by shattered boats, Vega leads Deneb into unfamiliar open sea. Alone and hungry, the young siblings encounter a spectacular giant whale and travel briefly with shark-hunting orcas. Trusting her instincts and gaining emotional strength from contemplating the vastness of the sky, Vega knows she must lead her brother home and help save her surviving family. In alternating first-person voices, Vega and Deneb tell their harrowing story, engaging young readers while educating them about the marine ecosystem. Realistic black-and-white illustrations enhance the maritime setting.
A dramatic, educational, authentic whale of a tale. (maps, wildlife facts, tribes of the Salish Sea watershed, environmental and geographical information, how to help orcas, author’s note, artist’s note, resources) (Animal fiction. 8-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-299592-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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