Well-developed characters populate a heartwarming tale.
A foursome of rising seventh graders, three boys and one girl, are sentenced to summer school.
Three of them failed a Florida academic assessment test and the other has no scores since he was home-schooled and recently moved to the state. All share a love of the online game Sandbox that, á la Minecraft, promotes creative exploration. While playing, they feel successful and competent, unencumbered by their individual diagnoses of dysgraphia, dyslexia, ADHD, and dysfluency. Their teacher, Ms. J, continually reminds them that they are divergent learners, the kind of people who can change the world. The four strike a deal with her: In exchange for reading out loud in class, Ms. J will join them in playing Sandbox. Desperately wanting to connect with the kids, Ms. J procures computers for so-called typing practice—actually Sandbox chat—and the nontraditional learning begins. Each young character has an expansive life outside the classroom that affects their academic performance and self-image. In addition to loss, a shared feeling is frustration in trying hard and still not measuring up. Over time, the relationships they form change them all. The book takes on different formats representing the individual thinking patterns of the student narrators—free verse, stream-of-consciousness prose, and sketchnotes—along with school reports and chat logs, adding visual interest and reader appeal. The text provides few physical descriptions, but two characters are cued by name as Latinx.
Well-developed characters populate a heartwarming tale. (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4521-8251-3
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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