An unevenly paced celebration of wacky summer adventures.
Epic end-of-summer plans go awry for five kids in Ohio.
Twelve-year-old Eddie Gordon Holloway is ready to have a blast at Beach Bash with his friends—it’s the day when everyone in town heads to Lake Erie for great food and live music. However, when his mom unearths the mountain of smelly laundry that he’s ignored for the entire summer, Eddie is left home in a literal funk, with nothing to wear but his glow-in-the-dark pineapple swim trunks. After a power outage, Eddie links up with four other left-behind kids, and they all enjoy fun times until the streetlights come on—but none of their families return from the party. The kids take action to prepare for whatever is happening in their new world without parents, gathering necessities from their neighbors’ empty houses and trying to keep each other’s spirits up with dad jokes and teasing, except in the truly gentle spaces where they admit their fears to each other. Ultimately, the buildup to the to-be-continued ending doesn’t quite deliver. Long-winded digressions interrupt the flow of the storytelling, and it takes almost half the book to get to the zany situations that provide most of the laughs. Matter-of-fact scenes with Eddie taking his ADHD medicine and talking through school and home pressures with Trey, their school’s all-star athlete, offer insightful representations of Black boys bonding on different emotional levels. All main characters read as Black.
An unevenly paced celebration of wacky summer adventures. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-74022-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hugely entertaining, timely, and triumphant.
Robot Roz undertakes an unusual ocean journey to save her adopted island home in this third series entry.
When a poison tide flowing across the ocean threatens their island, Roz works with the resident creatures to ensure that they will have clean water, but the destruction of vegetation and crowding of habitats jeopardize everyone’s survival. Brown’s tale of environmental depredation and turmoil is by turns poignant, graceful, endearing, and inspiring, with his (mostly) gentle robot protagonist at its heart. Though Roz is different from the creatures she lives with or encounters—including her son, Brightbill the goose, and his new mate, Glimmerwing—she makes connections through her versatile communication abilities and her desire to understand and help others. When Roz accidentally discovers that the replacement body given to her by Dr. Molovo is waterproof, she sets out to seek help and discovers the human-engineered source of the toxic tide. Brown’s rich descriptions of undersea landscapes, entertaining conversations between Roz and wild creatures, and concise yet powerful explanations of the effect of the poison tide on the ecology of the island are superb. Simple, spare illustrations offer just enough glimpses of Roz and her surroundings to spark the imagination. The climactic confrontation pits oceangoing mammals, seabirds, fish, and even zooplankton against hardware and technology in a nicely choreographed battle. But it is Roz’s heroism and peacemaking that save the day.
Hugely entertaining, timely, and triumphant. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780316669412
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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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