Full of heart and hope.
A young man grows up in the Dominican Republic with ambitions to play baseball while a young girl in Minnesota finds the world both bigger and more encouraging when she becomes his fan.
Brown-skinned Rafael falls in love with baseball in his hometown of San Pedro de Macoris. He plays in the neighborhood with a sock-wrapped stone for a ball and a stick for a bat and later in the nearby campo. Scaletta offers glimpses of the risks that baseball can bring in the Dominican Republic, where boys and struggling families hitch wagons to far-off stars. Twelve-year-old Maya’s white, middle-class Twin Cities family includes teen sister Grace, an aspiring sports writer. When Rafael, now grown, kindly autographs Grace’s ball at a spring-training game, Maya finds herself watching him closely and cheering him on, finding solace and connection in baseball. Maya worries about the health of the planet. Her summer project to grow a patch of prairie in her backyard to attract and shelter pollinators—bees—is painfully derailed by an insecticide made by her father’s company. Scaletta deftly weaves worry, optimism, and determination together in Rafael’s struggle to succeed and Maya’s grappling with love for her father. The tight focus on the emotional lives of his protagonists in these connecting narratives inspires genuine feeling for each.
Full of heart and hope. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8075-6742-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
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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