A fun, interactive guide to forging your own path in middle school.
Talia Zargari’s notebook helps her deal with the new challenges of sixth grade.
A few weeks into the school year, Dash, Talia’s neighbor and longtime best friend, tells her they can’t be friends anymore. Desperate to fit in, Dash succumbs to peer pressure and teasing from other boys. Hoping to be able to stay close to Dash through their shared love of math, Talia, whose mom is a computer programmer, is excited to join him on the mathlete team. As the only girl, Talia experiences discrimination from the team captain, however, so she decides to start a new, girls-only team. The Mathlete Mermaids show the boys’ team up by winning their first competition. But there is still work to be done in including girls in STEM, and the Mermaids must prove themselves in ways boys don’t. The book shows with authenticity how Talia has to manage complex feelings around growing up, recognizing her own mistakes, and making room for others, particularly when teammate Leticia, a skilled leader, steps in as Mermaids team captain. Talia’s love of code-breaking and scavenger hunts is incorporated through fun puzzles for readers to solve. Fans of Moss’ Amelia’s Notebooks series will feel at home with the engagingly illustrated text and tips for navigating social situations. Talia has tan skin and curly black hair; Dash reads Black, and background characters are diverse in appearance.
A fun, interactive guide to forging your own path in middle school. (author’s note) (Illustrated fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1802-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Walker US/Candlewick
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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