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
Poignant and heartwarming.
Zephyrina the cat, the “Robin Hood of felines,” rescues discarded toys so they can have new lives.
Zephyrina brings toys back to the apartment she shares with Elizaveta and her daughter, Dasha, refugees from war-torn Ukraine. Dasha reconditions Zephyrina’s rescues and sets them outside for three days, just in case they have owners who want to reclaim them. Afterward, they join the other toys in the parlor—the Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasured. Dasha and Elizaveta don’t know that the toys are sentient. At midnight they abandon their rigid daytime postures to cavort and play, overseen by their leader, Pocket, a tiny mascot bear made to comfort soldiers during World War I. One night, Zephyrina brings back a dirty old bear, and Pocket is astounded. The new arrival, Berwon, might come from a lost shipment of the first-ever stuffed bears, sent from Germany to the U.S. in 1903—and if so, he’s worth a fortune. In the ensuing antics, the unpleasant villain Picky Vicky covets Berwon, and a kind museum curator does, too, but for different reasons. Applegate’s writing is exquisitely nuanced; she couches profound themes in accessible language that depicts relatable situations. Gentle, generous Elizaveta and Dasha poignantly underscore the human impact of wars. Santoso’s enchanting, delicate, black-and-white illustrations bring the timeless feeling of a classic to this hopeful, humanizing story of the distressed looking out for each other.
Poignant and heartwarming. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781250904362
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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