A sweet, amusing tale about navigating friendship and family drama.
Maggie Diaz is back for the second half of seventh grade, cellphone in hand, ready for more adventures.
Set a few months after the first volume, this lighthearted second installment follows Maggie, now nearly 13, as she and best friends Julian and Zoey prepare for their Miami middle school’s big spring break trip to Saint Augustine. The spring semester arrival of new classmate Vanessa, who was formerly home-schooled, changes the trio’s dynamic, and things get even more awkward when Maggie’s recently widowed Abuela decides to be a chaperone for the trip. As friends and classmates begin to experience first crushes, Maggie explores her complicated feelings for her pal Eddie, who now sports earrings and eyeliner. The author packs an emotional punch into this fun middle school dramedy: sibling issues (Maggie continues to feel like she can’t compare to her perfect 16-year-old sister, Caro), loss (Abuela and the whole family are mourning Abuelo’s death), friendship jealousy, and first love. In addition to the Cuban American Diazes, the multicultural cast includes Haitian, Creole-speaking Zoey and Japanese and Puerto Rican Vanessa. There’s positive queer representation as well, since Caro now has a cool girlfriend. The cheerful, evocative spot-art illustrations vividly support the text. This is ideal reading for fans of Meg Medina’s Merci Suárez trilogy and anyone looking for stories about plucky girls with close-knit, multigenerational families.
A sweet, amusing tale about navigating friendship and family drama. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781338818611
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense.
In the midst of political turmoil, how do you escape the only country that you’ve ever known and navigate a new life? Parallel stories of three different middle school–aged refugees—Josef from Nazi Germany in 1938, Isabel from 1994 Cuba, and Mahmoud from 2015 Aleppo—eventually intertwine for maximum impact.
Three countries, three time periods, three brave protagonists. Yet these three refugee odysseys have so much in common. Each traverses a landscape ruled by a dictator and must balance freedom, family, and responsibility. Each initially leaves by boat, struggles between visibility and invisibility, copes with repeated obstacles and heart-wrenching loss, and gains resilience in the process. Each third-person narrative offers an accessible look at migration under duress, in which the behavior of familiar adults changes unpredictably, strangers exploit the vulnerabilities of transients, and circumstances seem driven by random luck. Mahmoud eventually concludes that visibility is best: “See us….Hear us. Help us.” With this book, Gratz accomplishes a feat that is nothing short of brilliant, offering a skillfully wrought narrative laced with global and intergenerational reverberations that signal hope for the future. Excellent for older middle grade and above in classrooms, book groups, and/or communities looking to increase empathy for new and existing arrivals from afar.
Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense. (maps, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-88083-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
PROFILES
An endearing protagonist runs the first, fast leg of Reynolds' promising relay.
Castle “Ghost” Cranshaw feels like he’s been running ever since his dad pulled that gun on him and his mom—and used it.
His dad’s been in jail three years now, but Ghost still feels the trauma, which is probably at the root of the many “altercations” he gets into at middle school. When he inserts himself into a practice for a local elite track team, the Defenders, he’s fast enough that the hard-as-nails coach decides to put him on the team. Ghost is surprised to find himself caring enough about being on the team that he curbs his behavior to avoid “altercations.” But Ma doesn’t have money to spare on things like fancy running shoes, so Ghost shoplifts a pair that make his feet feel impossibly light—and his conscience correspondingly heavy. Ghost’s narration is candid and colloquial, reminiscent of such original voices as Bud Caldwell and Joey Pigza; his level of self-understanding is both believably childlike and disarming in its perception. He is self-focused enough that secondary characters initially feel one-dimensional, Coach in particular, but as he gets to know them better, so do readers, in a way that unfolds naturally and pleasingly. His three fellow “newbies” on the Defenders await their turns to star in subsequent series outings. Characters are black by default; those few white people in Ghost’s world are described as such.
An endearing protagonist runs the first, fast leg of Reynolds' promising relay. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5015-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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