Honors the sweet mysteries of how to communicate with each other and the world.
Sixth grader Aurora Petrequin needs to say whatever she’s thinking.
She’s loud. Eleven-year-old Frenchie Livernois, her next-door neighbor, is autistic and nonvocal. Yet the moment these opposites meet they fit together perfectly. Frenchie focuses Aurora’s energy and helps her slow down and observe. Aurora looks out for Frenchie and leads him on adventures both nature lovers enjoy. But when Frenchie vanishes one day before school, Aurora, who feels bad about how often she messes up, realizes this is a “Worst Possible” fear come true, and her understanding of their best friendship is put to the test. Where did he go? Could she have stopped him from disappearing—and did she cause him to go? What does it all have to do with the piebald deer they spotted in the woods? Connor creates a playground of a coastal Maine town where the quirky locals are accessible and caring. Aurora’s and Frenchie’s families build an ecosystem that sustains and encourages their friendship, and Aurora’s buoyant enthusiasm infuses the story with adventurous fun and a lack of preachiness while not undercutting real stakes. However, Frenchie, although treated with respect, is a bit shortchanged and on occasion robbed of narrative autonomy. It can feel like he is being discussed rather than being involved, a situation compounded by the fact that fewer portions of the story are narrated from his point of view. Main characters default to White; Aurora is cued as neurodiverse.
Honors the sweet mysteries of how to communicate with each other and the world. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-299936-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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