For baseball lovers, it’s a winner.
Matt loves everything about baseball.
He is an excellent player on his Little League team in the summer All-Stars League. It doesn’t matter that he’s the shortest kid on the team, because baseball makes him feel “like his very best self.” He studies every aspect of the game and takes extra practices with his teammate José. His mom is his special personal coach, enthusiastically practicing hitting and fielding with him, always encouraging, not just about baseball, but also about his severe stutter. His speech pathologist is another support, eliciting his feelings when he is “blocked” or “stuck” and finding ways to help. Ben, another teammate, is having his own difficulties. He hits towering homers but strikes out more often. His father insists on a big swing and yells loudly at him to hit home runs. Matt and his mom try to coach him in ways to get more base hits, but his dad proves to be a negative force. Lupica keeps the focus on Matt’s struggles, his determination, and his genuine kindness, braiding it with action-packed play-by-play baseball and lots of references to current major league players. José is Puerto Rican, and there’s delightful Spanish-English wordplay in their banter. Matt and most of the other characters present white, though there are naming conventions that indicate some diversity.
For baseball lovers, it’s a winner. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2155-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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