Readers dive not only into Anthoni’s maturation, but into her resiliency.
When her mother’s magical summer plans for them dissolve, a preteen learns that living is less about planning than making the most of the moment.
Eleven-year-old Anthoni Gillis doesn’t just have a nontraditional name. She’s also had a nontraditional upbringing, crisscrossing the country with her single mother as she recruits workers via a pyramid scheme for Beauty & the Bee, a cosmetics company. Anthoni has always believed that “Positive Thoughts Attract Positive Results” and followed her mother’s many work affirmations until her mother takes her to The Showboat Resort at Thunder Lake for the summer. Once a place of nostalgia for Anthoni’s mother, the resort now sits in disrepair. Anthoni’s disappointment causes her to question her relationship with her mother for the first time in this debut novel that captures both the hopes and disillusionments of growing up. The goal-driven girl believes if she can turn popular Maddy, a former companion and now Thunder Lake resident, into a “True Blue Friend,” as the Showboat postcard promises, she’ll solve her problems. Could Charlotte, once known as the Boulay Mermaid and now Showboat’s eccentric owner, be an actual mermaid and the secret to her success? DJ, who’s living nearby with his aunt while his father recovers from depression, helps Anthoni realize the truth about friendship. The light mystery balances the story’s bittersweet realism and rushed, concluding turn of events. All characters are presumably white.
Readers dive not only into Anthoni’s maturation, but into her resiliency. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-30642-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
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