A tale of intergenerational bonding that may resonate with adult readers but will leave youngsters cold.
In the Newbery-winning author’s latest, a girl grapples with a beloved elder’s dementia.
Eleven-year-old Sophia (who goes by Sophie) Henry Winslow’s best friend is Sophie Gershowitz, her 88-year-old neighbor. Sophie Gershowitz’s adult son is concerned with her cognitive decline and thinks it may be time for her to move to an assisted living facility. The younger Sophie decides to prepare her friend for the cognitive tests so she’ll pass them and be able to stay. When Sophie Gershowitz struggles to recall three words—tree, table, book—Sophie Winslow invites her to recall related childhood stories in the hopes that it will help. Sophie Gershowitz shares slice-of-life tales from her girlhood in Poland before revealing how everything changed when World War II began. Sophie Winslow reflects: “I had never really got it, never understood history, how things fit together, because I needed someone to tell me the stories…of how things are lost, and what that means and how it hurts.” While the explanation of historical events is age-appropriate and at times compelling, the book feels more geared toward an adult sensibility than a child’s. The pacing is slow, and young Sophie’s storyline seems like an overly padded, self-conscious framing device. The protagonist is a quirk-filled bundle of idiosyncrasies; Lowry aims for precocious but sometimes stumbles into pretentious and judgmental, particularly with young Sophie’s attitudes toward her friend Ralphie’s love of junk food. Physical descriptions of characters are minimal.
A tale of intergenerational bonding that may resonate with adult readers but will leave youngsters cold. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780063299504
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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