A book that offers readers a stark look at the apartheidlike reality that exists for black people in America.
Isabella is a gifted 11-year-old pianist. She is also caught between two parents who have divorced.
Every week now sees what Isabella calls the “Great Exchange,” a ritual when she is handed off at the mall from one parent to another. Living in two places with different rules, each parent with a new partner, is a psychological juggling act. Isabella is also becoming ever more aware of her identity as a biracial child, with a black dad and white mother. The one constant in Isabella’s life is school. There, she has friends both black and white as well as an English teacher who works to provide culturally inclusive lessons for his class. As Isabella goes back and forth between parents, the issue of race becomes more and more prevalent in family discussions. And after a noose is found hanging in the school locker of one of Isabella’s best friends, a black girl, the story opens the door to more serious racist encounters. What begins as the story of a lively young piano player caught between two new families inexorably becomes a piercing interrogation of everyday racism that culminates in a terrifying, all-too-believable confrontation between Isabella and a cop. Isabella’s genuine 11-year-old voice captures events rarely seen in middle-grade fiction but too often seen by actual middle graders.
A book that offers readers a stark look at the apartheidlike reality that exists for black people in America. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4424-9500-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
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