A heartwarming story about living your own life fully, even in the face of obstacles.
Mia’s feelings about her Chinese and American roots are complicated by the Women’s World Cup soccer final between Team USA and Team China.
Bookworm Mia Tang struggles to kick a soccer ball, but she must raise her grade in her least favorite class, PE, if she hopes to attend the journalism camp she’s dreaming of. She perseveres in her goal of interviewing the women playing for the U.S. and Chinese teams. While Mia remains the keystone for this title, the supporting characters also help elevate the story. Her friend Jason’s dad’s storyline—told through Jason’s eyes—reveals internal pressures to succeed as an immigrant and the importance of family in Asian cultures. Meanwhile, Lupe, Mia’s other close friend, dreams of winning the Math Cup, but Mia’s mother gets into trouble for helping to coach the team. A central theme of this title is identity, and many Asian American children will relate to being ostracized as perpetual foreigners. Beloved adult characters also experience inequities in housing and the workplace. Yet the hope and excitement for the soccer players clearly inspire Mia, her family, and friends to fight for respect for themselves as they strive to do things others don’t believe they can achieve. Reassuringly, everything is resolved positively. Yang scores another win with this tightly paced entry that will ramp up the excitement for Mia’s next empowering adventure.
A heartwarming story about living your own life fully, even in the face of obstacles. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-77625-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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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