A tender celebration of friendship, bibliophilia, and queer families.
A summer without friends thaws the ice between squabbling sisters.
Rising sixth grader Chris Rossi, who lives on Staten Island, is upset that she won’t be able to join her best friend, Vicky Chan, for the reading challenge they’d planned together. Instead, she’s being sent to her maternal grandparents’ home in Leverett, Massachusetts. With neck surgery coming up, her mom, who lives with chronic pain, needs rest—and that won’t happen with Chris and her younger sister, Becca, around. Socially awkward Chris is an introvert who’s passionate about reading, while Becca is an athletic extrovert. This heartwarming story follows the two white-presenting sisters as they miss everyone back home and grow closer to one another. Leverett comes alive through the vivid portrayal of Nana and Papa, who believe that children must play outdoors instead of being glued to screens—an approach that works for outdoors-loving Becca but is hard for Chris. She also worries that Frank, Mom’s nonbinary butch girlfriend, will get sick of being a caregiver and leave. Award-winning author Gino’s sensitive depiction of the challenges children face when growing up with a parent with mobility challenges is noteworthy, although readers learn little about Mom apart from her disability. The girls’ feelings about their father, who lives in Florida, also go unmentioned, although Chris is aware that Mom “hate[s] his guts.” The novel effectively captures shifting family and friendship dynamics and the joy of reading.
A tender celebration of friendship, bibliophilia, and queer families. (reading log) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781546138174
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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