A diverting, fast-paced thriller aimed at girls.
In Kehret’s neatly plotted suspense story, Emmy Rushford, a valiant sixth-grade girl, stumbles onto a burglar’s lair while helping a youngster get food for herself and her hungry family.
Tenderhearted Emmy, whose mother is a judge for a local department store’s essay contest, stumbles across an entry from Sophie, a fifth-grade girl whose family is temporarily too poor to buy food. Emmy decides to make Sophie’s family her school community-service project, even though her mother has explicitly told her that the contest entries are confidential and that she could lose her job if it’s discovered that she has disclosed any information. To protect her mother, who, like Emmy, is not given much in the way of character complexity, Emmy makes an understandable kid’s judgment: She decides not to tell her mother what she’s up to. After a series of plausible plot twists, the situation spins out of control, and Emmy finds herself matching wits with a nasty thief, one who isn’t above a spot of kidnapping. How Emmy keeps her wits and uses her smarts as the situation escalates is the main pleasure in this suspenseful yet not too scary page-turner for middle-grade readers. Some oddball classmates add touches of humor, though a lightly sketched subplot about Emmy’s weight loss seems to belong in another tale entirely.
A diverting, fast-paced thriller aimed at girls. (Mystery. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-525-42652-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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
Telgemeier’s bold colors, superior visual storytelling, and unusual subject matter will keep readers emotionally engaged and...
Catrina narrates the story of her mixed-race (Latino/white) family’s move from Southern California to Bahía de la Luna on the Northern California coast.
Dad has a new job, but it’s little sister Maya’s lungs that motivate the move: she has had cystic fibrosis since birth—a degenerative breathing condition. Despite her health, Maya loves adventure, even if her lungs suffer for it and even when Cat must follow to keep her safe. When Carlos, a tall, brown, and handsome teen Ghost Tour guide introduces the sisters to the Bahía ghosts—most of whom were Spanish-speaking Mexicans when alive—they fascinate Maya and she them, but the terrified Cat wants only to get herself and Maya back to safety. When the ghost adventure leads to Maya’s hospitalization, Cat blames both herself and Carlos, which makes seeing him at school difficult. As Cat awakens to the meaning of Halloween and Day of the Dead in this strange new home, she comes to understand the importance of the ghosts both to herself and to Maya. Telgemeier neatly balances enough issues that a lesser artist would split them into separate stories and delivers as much delight textually as visually. The backmatter includes snippets from Telgemeier’s sketchbook and a photo of her in Día makeup.
Telgemeier’s bold colors, superior visual storytelling, and unusual subject matter will keep readers emotionally engaged and unable to put down this compelling tale. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-54061-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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