A moving and layered story of reflection and connection.
Suspended from school, seventh graders Eb and Flow find peace even as life doesn’t make it easy for them.
Ebony’s on her eighth suspension from Brookside Junior High, and 10 days at home in her strict grandmother’s crowded house isn’t exactly where she wants to be, but with both parents all but out of the picture, it’s the only option. De’Kari goes by Flow, a nickname from his rapper father, but he wants to forge his own path. Yet hitting Eb over her dirtying his new sneakers makes him reflect during his 10 restless days at home on the type of person he wants to be—and on memories of his dad hitting his mom. In parallel first-person verse narration, the two Black tweens reveal that they have a lot in common, including struggling with fathers away in the military. Throughout their suspensions, they unknowingly stay so close to each other that they peacefully pass one another by during a snowstorm. Breadcrumbs—sometimes heartbreaking, always poetic—scattered throughout the story gradually offer readers a path toward what really happened in the now-viral fight between the two, and as tensions escalate and extended families get involved along Brookside crew lines, the future is especially murky. A shared nightmare of the worst-case scenario puts a lot into perspective for Eb and Flow, returning optimism to the negotiating table and potentially pointing toward reconciliation.
A moving and layered story of reflection and connection. (Verse novel. 8-13)Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-42913-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions.
An isolated class of misfits and a teacher on the edge of retirement are paired together for a year of (supposed) failure.
Zachary Kermit, a 55-year-old teacher, has been haunted for the last 27 years by a student cheating scandal that has earned him the derision of his colleagues and killed his teaching spirit. So when he is assigned to teach the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class—a dumping ground for “the Unteachables,” students with “behavior issues, learning problems, juvenile delinquents”—he is unfazed, as he is only a year away from early retirement. His relationship with his seven students—diverse in temperament, circumstance, and ability—will be one of “uncomfortable roommates” until June. But when Mr. Kermit unexpectedly stands up for a student, the kids of SCS-8 notice his sense of “justice and fairness.” Mr. Kermit finds he may even care a little about them, and they start to care back in their own way, turning a corner and bringing along a few ghosts from Mr. Kermit’s past. Writing in the alternating voices of Mr. Kermit, most of his students, and two administrators, Korman spins a narrative of redemption and belief in exceeding self-expectations. Naming conventions indicate characters of different ethnic backgrounds, but the book subscribes to a white default. The two students who do not narrate may be students of color, and their characterizations subtly—though arguably inadequately—demonstrate the danger of preconceptions.
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256388-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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