Will inspire readers to go for their dreams, one leap at a time.
Brooklyn has one love: ballet.
She’s competing for a spot at the Texas School of the Arts, where she can focus on dance. Her first step: impress TSOTA’s scouts at the All-City Showcase with a pas de deux. Her teacher suggests a volunteer activity to round out her application and has the perfect project. Enter the fumbling (pun intended) Leighton Middle School football team; they’re taking conditioning classes at Brooklyn’s ballet studio, and Brooklyn will model the positions. Many girls in her class are excited about the boys—but not Brooklyn. The studio is her haven in her football-obsessed town, and she’s not pleased at the prospect of sharing it with boys who goof around during lessons and treat ballet like a joke. When dance partner Jayden breaks his leg, Brooklyn almost gives up on the showcase, but then her teacher suggests Logan, a football player, fill in. He agrees, on one condition: that Brooklyn give football a chance. She promises, but that will never happen. Or will it? A family dispute over Brooklyn’s superstar high school–football-player stepbrother Tanner’s future adds an extra layer of tension to the story. Brooklyn’s friend Mia is biracial, Japanese and white. Former partner Jayden is 6 feet tall and, as he calls himself “the LeBron James of ballet,” is implied black. Brooklyn, her family, and Logan are all default white (as is much of the rest of the cast).
Will inspire readers to go for their dreams, one leap at a time. (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5344-0458-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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