This tightly written chapter book has just the right amount of pathos for middle-grade readers.
Hurt by her overworked mother’s insistence that she’s a bad girl, 10-year-old Weezie tries her best to prove her wrong.
Fixing meals and babysitting her half siblings isn’t enough to make up for breaking Gramma Emmeline’s teapot. Weezie misses her deceased grandmother’s love and the way she called her by her full name, Grace Louise. Now she constantly gets in trouble and has to spend weekends at home alone in the trailer park while whiny Ruth Ann and Jackson get Momma’s attention. The only bright light in her life is the recognition her teacher gives her for her artistic talent, which goes unnoticed by Momma. Weezie knows who Ruth Ann’s father was, and Jackson’s daddy comes around often, but she doesn’t even know her own father’s name. She starts lying about him at school, making herself even more miserable. In desperation, she sets out on a search of her own, with surprising results. Weezie’s earnest attempts to find her father without her mother’s cooperation and her persistent efforts to be a better person are touchingly revealed through her candid narration. Strong secondary characters round out the portrayal of small-town life in Oklahoma, including Weezie’s investigative partner, her friend Calvin, who is “a little slow in his thinking” but never judges Weezie for what she does.
This tightly written chapter book has just the right amount of pathos for middle-grade readers. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4778-4729-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Two Lions
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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