A cute story with a few leaps in logic.
Imagine wanting to be a fashion designer when your mother is the actual Sleeping Beauty who fell asleep under a spell for 100 years after pricking her finger on a spindle.
Middle schooler Aria Thornbrier is the fashion-conscious daughter of Sleeping Beauty, but her mom forbids her to sew, as she believes that Aria may prick her finger and suffer the same fate. Defying her mother’s needle phobia and determined to become a fashion designer, Aria secretly joins the school’s new Couture Club. Wearing one of her designs while on an outing with her fashion classmates, Aria is noticed by a talent scout who recruits her to audition for the reality TV show Teen Couture. Aria becomes a contestant, but predictably, soon into the competition, she pricks her finger and falls under a spell—not one that puts her to sleep, however, but that compels her to speak only in Shakespearean dialect, or Shakespeak. With very little time, she must figure out who cast the spell, as her new language will ruin her chances of winning Teen Couture. Assuming her readers’ familiarity with the Grimms, Littman jumps right in with characters from European fairy tales who somehow live in modern-day New York. Although she never quite explains how Sleeping Beauty’s family arrived in the 21st century, young aspiring fashionistas will enjoy this junior version of Project Runway.
A cute story with a few leaps in logic. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5130-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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