A nuanced story of first romance that stays true to its characters.
In Nilsen’s middle-grade novel, a seventh grade girl crushes hard on a fellow classmate.
Millie Jackson may have (mostly) moved on from her deep-seated infatuation with pop star Rory Calhoun, the object of her desire in Nilsen’s previous novel, Worldwide Crush (2023), but that doesn’t mean she’s given up on love entirely. Now, in seventh grade social studies, she has a new target: brown-eyed, floppy-haired Scott Fenwick. “Never have I ever dared to consider that someone—a very cute someone—might actually like me. As in like me like me. Until now.” They pass notes in class and even salvage a sweet moment out of a very embarrassing trip to Target with Millie’s mom and kooky great-grandma Phyllis, but Millie is never quite sure how Scott feels. She takes notes in the titular Scott Fenwick Diary, often consulting her best friend, Shauna, who is simultaneously dealing with her own family drama. Meanwhile, pressure to participate in activities like grandma-sitting and an intensely awkward family talent show performance piles on. But Millie perseveres in keeping her crush active, inserting herself into Scott’s life by befriending his neighbor Tibbs and procuring an invitation to his bar mitzvah. After a missed kiss at the big event, Millie is fully engrossed in her devastation until her beloved dog, Pringles, suffers an accident that makes her re-evaluate her relationships and herself. In this sequel, Nilsen nails the nuances of being a young teenager with feelings so big they overexamine even the smallest moments. Millie’s anxieties and concerns over things like how to kiss may make readers cringe, but only because they are so real and relatable. Her PG-rated swearword substitutes like “Gob!” and “Holy Christmas” are annoying, but they contribute to her overall characterization. Yet despite Millie’s personal devotion to Scott, Nilsen makes it clear that rather than a “will-they, won’t-they” narrative, this is a story of self-discovery.
A nuanced story of first romance that stays true to its characters.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781684633265
Page Count: 272
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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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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