Overall, a nice choice for a book club, full of heart and imagination.
Sophia is desperate to find a world where her impossible Memories of life with her dead mother are real, but what will she do if she gets there?
Sophia, 12, lives in a small town where everyone knows each other. For a science project about the coming solar eclipse, she is partnered with DeAndre, or DJ, a smart boy whose father has run off and whose older sister drives “an indecently red car,” and with Luke, an explosive boy whose sister died in a car accident. Sophia and DJ learn that they were both born on the day of the last solar eclipse in their town. They also both have Memories, experiences that feel more real than daydreams, in which they live moments from lives that are different from theirs: Sophia’s mother is alive, and DJ has a loving stepfather. They set out to find where these Memories exist, and Luke joins them in the hope that he can find a world in which his dead sister is alive. Can they find their happier parallel universes? And what will happen if they do? Zhang’s writing is a pleasure to read, and her resistance to tying up each character’s loose ends is refreshing for readers who like to ponder. The loose ends of the parallel-universe concept, however, may not satisfy fantasy fans. The cast seems to be a largely white one with the exception of DJ and his family, who are black; that the only black dad in the book has left his family is unfortunate.
Overall, a nice choice for a book club, full of heart and imagination. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7865-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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