Readers will feel they’d be lucky to have Allie as their best friend.
As the principal’s kid, Allie West is both insider and outsider.
She loves her secret, insider life: she gets to see what teachers are like when they’re not being teachers, and her good pal Frances the custodian lets Allie use the floor buffer. Then there is the Afters, a club with three other students whose parents work at the school and who entertain themselves every afternoon with Eavesdropping Bingo and Random Acts of Awesomesauce. Despite these perks, Allie just wants to be a regular kid—being the principal’s kid “is the worst.” Her classmates avoid her since that one time she accidentally ratted on a classmate, her now-former best friend, Chloe. Allie believes two things will make her life normal and restore her to the good graces of the students of Mountain Crest Elementary: make amends with Chloe and earn acceptance to the Pentagon, the school’s champion math club. Allie makes mistakes but takes things in stride; her cleareyed, first-person narration makes the story, and she’s very easy to sympathize with. She’ll have to learn that everyone has their own version of normal—and that maybe her life is her kind of normal. Aside from some non-Anglo surnames such as Cruz, Santos, and Alvarez, this school story inspired by the author’s own experiences as a principal’s kid appears to be populated by white people.
Readers will feel they’d be lucky to have Allie as their best friend. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-81379-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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