An exuberant, rousing celebration of youth activism.
A 12-year-old girl claims her place in a turbulent world.
After years of being silenced at school, Mexican American Celina is ready for a clean start. It’s not easy starting middle school in a new town, and now her dad has been deported yet again. While she, her mother, and Gramma trust her papacito will find a way to return, as he has before, his absence is always painful. Still, Celi makes one friend, then two more, and the four middle schoolers quickly find refuge and strength in each other. The friendships become lifelines over the course of the year as they face ordinary middle school challenges—homework, mean kids—and broader social turmoil with the emerging Covid-19 pandemic, the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, increasing awareness of global warming, and more. Tafolla skillfully weaves these significant recent historic moments and the hopeful stories of leaders like Emma Tenayuca and César Chávez together with the more specific experiences of the four friends as Celina is racially profiled by a teacher and a Covid death hits close to home. The friends, who are Chicano, are distinct enough, but a few are more thinly drawn; protagonist Celi, an emerging poet, is consistently and vividly rendered, though, and her righteous, powerful, and joyful voice carries the day.
An exuberant, rousing celebration of youth activism. (author’s note, land acknowledgement) (Verse fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593354711
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
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