Despite the strong technology plot, the poor execution in the friendship storylines undermines the moral of the story.
The coding club girls prepare a technological treat for the school dance while fashionista Maya deals with friendship and bad influences.
Over the summer, Chinese-American Maya got in big trouble hanging out with the neighbors’ visiting niece, shoplifter Nicole: Maya attempted to steal a bottle of nail polish and crashed into the display, getting busted and losing her mother’s trust. When Nicole permanently moves to the neighborhood and starts in at Maya’s school, she’s quick to apologize, repent, and seek to renew friendship with Maya. In spite of her mother’s misgivings, Maya gives Nicole another chance. But certain signs (some legitimate, some overblown) point to Nicole as trouble, and Maya’s limited time is at a premium. Nicole competes for it against the coding club and its newest project. Their task is to use code to creatively, artistically enhance the upcoming school dance, and they choose to program lights to respond to music. The troubleshooting and trial-and-error elements of the code storyline effectively demonstrate how and what can be done with code, and they are far more believable than the forced, frequently unsatisfying social storylines. The latter include some dance drama involving Latina Sophia, African-American Lucy, and white Erin that is easily resolved—Pakistani-American Leila is spared it altogether. Given Maya’s careful delineation of club members’ races, her failure to identify Nicole jars.
Despite the strong technology plot, the poor execution in the friendship storylines undermines the moral of the story. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-54253-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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