Full of heart and hope.
A young man grows up in the Dominican Republic with ambitions to play baseball while a young girl in Minnesota finds the world both bigger and more encouraging when she becomes his fan.
Brown-skinned Rafael falls in love with baseball in his hometown of San Pedro de Macoris. He plays in the neighborhood with a sock-wrapped stone for a ball and a stick for a bat and later in the nearby campo. Scaletta offers glimpses of the risks that baseball can bring in the Dominican Republic, where boys and struggling families hitch wagons to far-off stars. Twelve-year-old Maya’s white, middle-class Twin Cities family includes teen sister Grace, an aspiring sports writer. When Rafael, now grown, kindly autographs Grace’s ball at a spring-training game, Maya finds herself watching him closely and cheering him on, finding solace and connection in baseball. Maya worries about the health of the planet. Her summer project to grow a patch of prairie in her backyard to attract and shelter pollinators—bees—is painfully derailed by an insecticide made by her father’s company. Scaletta deftly weaves worry, optimism, and determination together in Rafael’s struggle to succeed and Maya’s grappling with love for her father. The tight focus on the emotional lives of his protagonists in these connecting narratives inspires genuine feeling for each.
Full of heart and hope. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8075-6742-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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SEEN & HEARD
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