An engaging, feel-good novel about elementary school life.
Following series opener A Whole New Ballgame (2015), this second installment of the Rip and Red series finds the eponymous fifth-graders feeling pretty good about the year…until a new girl turns their world upside down.
A diverse cast of characters highlights this good-natured, high-spirited slice of life at Reese Jones Elementary School. Narrator Mason Irving, nicknamed Rip, is an African-American student whose mother is a principal at another school. Blake Daniels, nicknamed Red for his hair, is on the autism spectrum, Avery is in a wheelchair, and their new teacher, Mr. Acevedo, has family in the Dominican Republic. Mr. Acevedo’s class is a student’s dream—lots of breaks in the school day, few tests, and not much in the way of worksheets. Enter Takara Eid, called Tiki by her friends, with an Egyptian father and a forceful presence. Tiki turns out to be quite the basketball player, and she leads a protest against the terrible food in the cafeteria. Her aggressive personality forces everyone to rethink their places in the elementary school universe, and everyone is changed. Even Red makes satisfying emotional progress and becomes something of a hero in the end. Bildner, a former teacher, casts an affectionate eye on school life and creates likable characters in realistic school situations, managing to make characters unique within their school group.
An engaging, feel-good novel about elementary school life. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-30134-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions.
An isolated class of misfits and a teacher on the edge of retirement are paired together for a year of (supposed) failure.
Zachary Kermit, a 55-year-old teacher, has been haunted for the last 27 years by a student cheating scandal that has earned him the derision of his colleagues and killed his teaching spirit. So when he is assigned to teach the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class—a dumping ground for “the Unteachables,” students with “behavior issues, learning problems, juvenile delinquents”—he is unfazed, as he is only a year away from early retirement. His relationship with his seven students—diverse in temperament, circumstance, and ability—will be one of “uncomfortable roommates” until June. But when Mr. Kermit unexpectedly stands up for a student, the kids of SCS-8 notice his sense of “justice and fairness.” Mr. Kermit finds he may even care a little about them, and they start to care back in their own way, turning a corner and bringing along a few ghosts from Mr. Kermit’s past. Writing in the alternating voices of Mr. Kermit, most of his students, and two administrators, Korman spins a narrative of redemption and belief in exceeding self-expectations. Naming conventions indicate characters of different ethnic backgrounds, but the book subscribes to a white default. The two students who do not narrate may be students of color, and their characterizations subtly—though arguably inadequately—demonstrate the danger of preconceptions.
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256388-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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