A sweet and satisfying mystery.
When things start to go missing in Urchin Beach, including a precious town symbol, Amelia and her brothers and sisters are determined to find the thief and save an honored tradition.
The Dragonfly Day Festival is a beloved event for Amelia MacGuffin’s family and many others. People come from all over to their small Pacific Northwest town to swing the wooden staff, which has a dragonfly-shaped mark on it, believing that three twirls over their heads will bring good luck into their lives. After the staff is stolen just days before the big celebration, a series of ill-timed misfortunes befalls the area. Family life unfolds against this backdrop. Amelia, who is about to start sixth grade, sits at the awkward and sacred intersection between childhood and young adulthood. She’s responsible, quick-witted, and introspective, a likable main character. Her siblings Bridget and Colin have their own useful and unique personality traits, and Duncan and Emma, the twin toddlers, are adorable tag-alongs. When a lovable dog they name Doc comes into their lives, the kids do everything they can to convince their parents to keep him, a journey that includes surprises. The central whodunit buoys readers along, the answer delightfully being both unpredictable and obvious. Amelia and her family are White; there is ethnic diversity among her friends and other secondary characters. This is a well-imagined, absorbing world, the story original and inviting.
A sweet and satisfying mystery. (Mystery. 8-12)Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781338818581
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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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