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
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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