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
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message.
Two boys equally blessed with both talent and ego vie for supremacy in their school’s annual “creative storytelling competition.”
J is “by far the best artist in the entire fifth grade”; K has “become known as the best writer in the entire fifth grade.” Naturally, each one is determined to crush it in The Contest, and each decides an illustrated story is the way to go. The competitive boys try to undermine one another by passing along fake tips for success, each hoping to destroy his opponent’s story. K advises J to “write what you DON’T know” and to use sixth-person narration. “J’s Secrets to Drawing Really Good” are just as catastrophic and include drawing with your nondominant hand and inserting mistakes to keep readers engaged. Creative hijinks ensue. Craft and Alexander have become known on social media for the jocular trash talk they heap on each other; J and K are their fictional child avatars. As an internet bit doled out in small doses, their frenemy-ship is amusing; as a sustained story about storytelling, it’s thin on both character and plot development. Authorial interjections exhort readers to look up 75-cent vocabulary, often used in barbs directed at each other; the latter feel like in-jokes more than playful attempts to engage young readers. Kids may enjoy spotting references to popular children’s authors among the characters’ names, and budding authors and illustrators will benefit from the advice. J and K are both Black; their classmates and teachers are racially diverse.
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780316582681
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
