Readers will feel they’d be lucky to have Allie as their best friend.
As the principal’s kid, Allie West is both insider and outsider.
She loves her secret, insider life: she gets to see what teachers are like when they’re not being teachers, and her good pal Frances the custodian lets Allie use the floor buffer. Then there is the Afters, a club with three other students whose parents work at the school and who entertain themselves every afternoon with Eavesdropping Bingo and Random Acts of Awesomesauce. Despite these perks, Allie just wants to be a regular kid—being the principal’s kid “is the worst.” Her classmates avoid her since that one time she accidentally ratted on a classmate, her now-former best friend, Chloe. Allie believes two things will make her life normal and restore her to the good graces of the students of Mountain Crest Elementary: make amends with Chloe and earn acceptance to the Pentagon, the school’s champion math club. Allie makes mistakes but takes things in stride; her cleareyed, first-person narration makes the story, and she’s very easy to sympathize with. She’ll have to learn that everyone has their own version of normal—and that maybe her life is her kind of normal. Aside from some non-Anglo surnames such as Cruz, Santos, and Alvarez, this school story inspired by the author’s own experiences as a principal’s kid appears to be populated by white people.
Readers will feel they’d be lucky to have Allie as their best friend. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-81379-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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