A feel-good tween drama packed with positive life lessons.
Millie, Nora, and Bea, with help from their magical fortune tellers, have patched up their friendship and are looking forward to a summer adventure together.
In 2024’s Fortune Tellers, a misunderstanding, the pandemic, and family moves separated the longtime friends—until mysterious messages in fortune tellers they’d created years ago led them to reconcile. Now, after Millie invites them to her house on a lake in the Berkshires, the rising eighth graders, who are cued white, are excited—and a little anxious—about being together nonstop for a month. In alternating chapters, each girl reveals her innermost thoughts. During their vacation, the friends will also be running their own little summer camp for 8-year-old triplets. After some discussion about whether to share their special secret, they introduce their charges to the joys of folding paper fortune tellers and writing on them with the magical Write Your Destiny markers. Once again, the fortune tellers start delivering messages the girls need to hear, not necessarily the words they wrote, helping them navigate interpersonal conflict, crushes, and family issues. When they decide to protest some proposed commercial development of the area, the fortune teller messages encourage them. Greenwald expertly describes the emotions behind the girls’ experiences as well as the commitment that leads them to pledge to be open about their feelings with each other, and Millie’s and Nora’s Jewish identities are woven into the story.
A feel-good tween drama packed with positive life lessons. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780063255906
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
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