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
Heartening and hopeful, a love letter to black male youth grasping the desires within them, absorbing the worlds around...
Cooler-than-cool newcomer Styx Malone takes the more-sheltered brothers Caleb and Bobby Gene on a mischievous, path-altering, summer adventure of a lifetime as they embrace the extraordinary possibilities beyond the everyday in rural Indiana.
Readers may think an adventure such as they’ll find here wouldn’t be possible in the present day; this story takes place outside, where nature, know-how, creativity, and curiosity rule. Creeks, dirt roads, buried treasures, and more make up the landscape in Sutton, Indiana. Younger brother Caleb narrates, letting readers know from the outset that he’s tired of his dad’s racially tinged determination that they be safely ordinary: “I don’t want to be ordinary. I want to be…the other thing.” With Styx Malone around, Caleb and Bobby Gene will sure figure out what that “other thing” can become. The three black adolescents are enchanted with the miracle of the Great Escalator Trade, the mythic one-thing-leads-to-another bartering scheme that just might get them farther from Sutton than they’ve ever dreamed. As they get deeper and deeper into cahoots with Styx, they begin to notice that Styx harbors some secret ambitions of his own, further twisting this grand summer journey. “How do you move through the world knowing that you’re special, when no one else can see it?” begs the soul of this novel.
Heartening and hopeful, a love letter to black male youth grasping the desires within them, absorbing the worlds around them, striving to be more otherwise than ordinary. Please share. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1595-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
PERSPECTIVES
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