A tender, warmhearted tale in a memorable setting.
Eleven-year-old New Jersey boy Jake spends the summer with his grandmother on Dewees Island, South Carolina.
Jake’s Air Force mom must remain with his dad, who was severely injured while serving in Afghanistan, leaving Jake with no other options. He narrates his own tale, admitting his all-consuming fears for his dad. Grandmother Honey appears somewhat unkempt. She is easily tired and lives in a messy house with a refrigerator containing spoiled food, a result of a long depression after being widowed. Despite the lack of internet, Jake grows to love his loft bedroom surrounded by his dad’s childhood books and nature journals. Honey gives him chores and insists that he spend his time outdoors exploring the island and recording his observations in his own journal. Saving his writing for descriptive letters to his dad, Jake prefers to draw what he sees, and his pencil sketches enhance the sense of place. Jake’s new friends, Lovie and Macon, share his adventures, and the friends encourage each other, providing comfort and understanding when needed. With guidance from a newly energized Honey, they even become absorbed in protecting loggerhead turtle nests. Monroe and May seamlessly incorporate fascinating nature facts into a tale of Jake’s adventures and near disasters. Readers will admire Jake’s compassion, perseverance, and strength and find themselves moved to laughter and tears as his summer unfolds. Most major characters are assumed White; Macon is Black.
A tender, warmhearted tale in a memorable setting. (sources) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2727-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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