Sports fans will eat it up.
Ben McBain and his friends are still celebrating their incredible football championship season (Game Changers, 2012) when the time arrives to prepare for basketball.
As always, Ben is the heart and soul of his team and looks forward to maintaining their athletic success. A preseason scrimmage with a rival team introduces a new challenge: Chase Braggs, a talented player with an attitude that seems from the beginning to be directed at Ben. Before he realizes it, Ben has let Chase get under his skin and turned from his love of excellence for its own sake to proving he can outdo the brash newcomer. Ben’s relentless pursuit of victory results in a serious injury to his friend Sam that will be a tough blow to their team. As if that isn’t enough, Chase seems to be making inroads in a friendship with Lily, someone who has always been an important presence in Ben’s otherwise sports-dominated life. Like the first in the series, this volume provides an action-packed look at middle school sports as it explores issues of friendship, problem solving and coming-of-age. Once again, the adults provide guidance in supportive roles, but the kid characters, especially Ben, demonstrate the ability of younger teens to learn from their experiences. A reconciliation between Ben and Chase doesn’t quite ring true, but this is a slight quibble in an otherwise satisfying read.
Sports fans will eat it up. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-38183-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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