Unique characters, inventive names (Comfort’s best friend Declaration, who betrays their friendship), a fresh voice and an...
Comfort Snowberger has attended 247 funerals, not because she’s morose but because the Snowberger Funeral Home in Snapfinger, Mississippi, is where she lives with her family.
In fact, the dead center of the story, so to speak, is the funeral home. When Uncle Edisto dies and then 90-year-old, great-great-Aunt Florentine, Comfort learns that “it’s not how you die that makes the important impression, it’s how you live.” A difficult belief to accept when tragedy strikes Comfort, her dog, Dismay, and her eight-year-old sniveling cousin, Peach, all caught in a flash flood on the way to Florentine’s graveside service. As Comfort clutches Peach to keep him from going under, Dismay is swept away. Despite the setting and plot, the story is not morbid but is an original celebration of life.
Unique characters, inventive names (Comfort’s best friend Declaration, who betrays their friendship), a fresh voice and an honest portrayal of life and death are a match made in heaven—and despite the bland title, a memorable tribute to the joys of living. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-205113-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Gulliver/Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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