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
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
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
SEEN & HEARD
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