Character-driven, thought-provoking, often funny, and, above all, timely.
Heather Sorensen rose from poverty to lead a major menstrual products company, but she’s MIA when her daughter gets her first period.
Eden, 13, was fulfilling Heather’s lofty dream for her future—Olympic medal–winning gymnast—until a growth spurt and injury cut it short. Though less invested in her divorced mother’s ambitions, Eden feels lost: Gymnastics always came first, leaving little time for friends. She rarely sees her pilot dad and is often alone in the enormous Seattle-area mansion she shares with Heather, whose high-profile career trumps parenting. Heather’s appearance at a career day assembly to extol her company, MySecret, leaves Eden feeling humiliated and a target for teasing. After she defends herself against a harassing boy with help from classmate Maribel, both girls are suspended. With Heather unreachable, Maribel’s mom brings them to the food pantry she manages, where Eden starts her period. Maribel’s Guatemalan immigrant family take to Eden, as do their friends Will, a trans boy, and his mom, Raven (who are White, like Eden). Raven’s small nonprofit makes and distributes free, reusable cloth menstrual pads. Learning about period poverty (and poverty, period), Eden ponders ways to fund period products and gets a crash course in income inequality, but her commitment to social justice strains her relationship with Heather. Readers learn about these subjects alongside Eden in a well-integrated way and will root for the quirky, well-rounded characters who challenge outdated cultural taboos.
Character-driven, thought-provoking, often funny, and, above all, timely. (author’s note, glossary, resources) (Fiction. 8-14)Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781534496262
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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