Sweet but heavy on lessons learned.
For a journal assignment, all the girls in the Daring Dreamers Club have chosen a Disney princess with whom they feel a connection.
In this second entry in the series, Piper has selected Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, because they both have several obstacles to overcome. She is dyslexic, has difficulties reading and writing, and now has trouble solving math word problems. Her greatest joy is experimenting with food using the scientific method to concoct her recipes. She has been selected to participate in a reality TV show that challenges child chefs and offers a large monetary prize to the winner. She learns that obstacles need not be faced alone and that she has the support of her family and her friends in the club. Piper’s tale is interspersed with her journal entries and those of the other club members, sharing their thoughts about their own challenges. Piper is Jewish, conveyed in a reference to Passover, Mariana is Latina, Zahra is Muslim, and Ruby is white, a child of divorce. Milla is African-American and the heroine of the previous series entry. Although the girls have distinct and interesting personalities, the ethnic and racial diversity feels skin-deep; interestingly, not one girl chooses to focus on a princess that shares her race or ethnicity. Soderberg employs a compassionate, light, and humorous tone, allowing readers to root wholeheartedly for Piper, but the princess connection tries too hard.
Sweet but heavy on lessons learned. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7364-3944-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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