Persistence in the face of defeat and disappointment defines a season of sports and adolescent life.
Ice hockey provides an outlet for young boys in a tough town, but the season comes with its own challenges.
The Strikers are a youth ice hockey team in 1980s Flint, Michigan, a club of misfits in a low-stakes league. Evan’s slightly skeptical about signing on with this crew and tempers his hopes for a successful season. He’s not wrong to doubt—the star player (also the coach’s son) wrecks his ACL in game one, leaving the team without a coach or captain. The season stays bumpy, with frustrating losses, a knock-down fight, and a few moments of glory. Disappointments abound off the ice as well. Evan’s mom’s boyfriend is unemployed and unreliable when Evan needs coaching support, and though Evan’s dad wants to coach, he has to leave town to work for extended periods. Other teammates face their own challenges, with their backgrounds detailed in trading card–style bios at the start of this graphic novel, but the central story is squarely Evan’s. Angular illustrations express emotional interactions effectively but feel a bit stiff for conveying dynamic game play. Ultimately, however, the sense that sports can tenuously hold things together for the kids, their parents, and their struggling city is poignant and palpable. Although most of the athletes present white, the lineup includes Black twin brothers who are multisport athletes keeping busy in their off-seasons.
Persistence in the face of defeat and disappointment defines a season of sports and adolescent life. (Graphic fiction. 8-14)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798765607466
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Graphic Universe
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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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