A whimsical, enchanting adventure grounded in friendship and resilience.
Ten-and-a-half-year-old Blessing is experiencing the longest winter London has seen in centuries.
It’s March, but the heavy snow shows no signs of melting. Even worse, winter sometimes makes her mom so sad that Blessing has to stay with other families while she recovers in the hospital. Blessing has been skipping school to avoid her bullies, and one afternoon, while she’s hiding in Victoria Park, she meets an eccentric 627-year-old talking snowman named Albert Framlington. The new friends set out to fix “the broken weather,” so that spring can return to England and Albert and the other snowmen can follow their natural cycle of melting and reappearing in a wintry part of the world. This heartwarming and hopeful story moves at a brisk pace as Blessing and Albert race to complete their mission. Stephenson gently and honestly explores bullying, foster care, and seasonal affective disorder (the latter two aren’t explicitly named as such in the text) through the eyes of a child in accessible language that is ideal for readers who are gaining confidence in reading longer novels. Blessing works to stop the bullying and support her mother. In a nuanced depiction of foster care, her placement family is kind but no substitute for home. Brown’s charming spot illustrations show Blessing as a Black girl and Albert as stout, with angular stick eyebrows, bottle cap eyes, a potato nose, three jaunty leaves for hair, and a tattered scarf.
A whimsical, enchanting adventure grounded in friendship and resilience. (notes to readers) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781665985345
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
Poignant and heartwarming.
Zephyrina the cat, the “Robin Hood of felines,” rescues discarded toys so they can have new lives.
Zephyrina brings toys back to the apartment she shares with Elizaveta and her daughter, Dasha, refugees from war-torn Ukraine. Dasha reconditions Zephyrina’s rescues and sets them outside for three days, just in case they have owners who want to reclaim them. Afterward, they join the other toys in the parlor—the Second Chances Home for the Tossed and Treasured. Dasha and Elizaveta don’t know that the toys are sentient. At midnight they abandon their rigid daytime postures to cavort and play, overseen by their leader, Pocket, a tiny mascot bear made to comfort soldiers during World War I. One night, Zephyrina brings back a dirty old bear, and Pocket is astounded. The new arrival, Berwon, might come from a lost shipment of the first-ever stuffed bears, sent from Germany to the U.S. in 1903—and if so, he’s worth a fortune. In the ensuing antics, the unpleasant villain Picky Vicky covets Berwon, and a kind museum curator does, too, but for different reasons. Applegate’s writing is exquisitely nuanced; she couches profound themes in accessible language that depicts relatable situations. Gentle, generous Elizaveta and Dasha poignantly underscore the human impact of wars. Santoso’s enchanting, delicate, black-and-white illustrations bring the timeless feeling of a classic to this hopeful, humanizing story of the distressed looking out for each other.
Poignant and heartwarming. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781250904362
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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