A riveting, courage-filled story.
Grief, memories, and the difficulty of letting go permeate this powerful story about family, friendship, and finding your voice.
Pandita Paul’s Bengali family includes two older twin sisters, Shar and Indy, and their father, Baba, but it has a gaping hole: their late Ma. This chasm is deepened as the nearby abandoned Johnson property, including the orchard Pandu and Ma called Ashar Jaiga, or place of hope, is being sold and developed for rental units. This demolition will take with it Pandu’s sweet recollections of enjoying the orchard’s apricots, flowers, and bird song with Ma. Things are changing too fast for Pandu. Worse, everyone seems to be moving on, including her ex–best friend and even Baba, who is dating The Intruder. But tentative friendships blossom at her summer drama camp even as Pandu, desperately clinging to her memories of Ma, is pitted against her own sister, who advocates for affordable housing in their Silicon Valley community. Set in the 1980s, this beautifully written book weaves together the Indian American Pauls’ personal histories as well as those of the U.S. and India. In trying to save the place she and her mother loved, the 13-year-old embarks on a journey that takes her down pathways of memory of earlier inhabitants of the Johnson house and the region. In doing so, Pandu gives wings to her words and her voice. There’s poetry here, along with literature and lots of culinary heritage, all combining in a deeply compelling read.
A riveting, courage-filled story. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780374388515
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
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