A moving, mesmerizing story of wishing, listening and hope for discerning readers.
A sensitive boy with a troubled past and an artistic girl whose cache of wishes has almost expired find solace and friendship in a magical valley.
Twelve-year-old Peter and his family have recently moved to rural Texas Hill Country to escape his issues with bullies in San Antonio. Peter’s unemployed father urges him to “toughen up,” while his resentful, overworked mother can’t understand her withdrawn son. An outsider in a loud family that considers him a weirdo, Peter retreats to an isolated valley for solitude. Here he finds Annie, also 12, who’s staying at a nearby camp. “[W]eird and bossy,” Annie’s passionate about art, and she and Peter bond in the valley’s protective atmosphere. Annie calls herself a “wish girl,” but Peter eventually realizes she’s a Make-a-Wish kid whose leukemia has returned. When local bullies terrorize Peter, he opts to run away with Annie, who’s avoiding more cancer treatment, but their escape’s thwarted, and Peter’s forced to speak out. As in Loftin’s Nightingale’s Nest (2014), the first-person narration in lyrical prose adds immediacy to Peter’s and Annie’s life-challenging situations as their transforming friendship plays out in a setting suffused with magical realism.
A moving, mesmerizing story of wishing, listening and hope for discerning readers. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59514-686-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Razorbill/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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