A thoughtful portrait of friendship across class lines in modern Pakistan.
When 11-year-old Houston native Mimi Scotts lands with her mother in Karachi, Pakistan, for summer vacation, she’s not sure what to expect—especially from her Pakistani grandparents, whom she is meeting for the first time.
Mimi’s mother grows increasingly distracted and distant as she navigates the fallout of her failed marriage to Mimi’s White father. Mimi grounds herself by writing to her estranged father in her journal. Although most servants in Mimi’s grandparents’ enormous house are excited about the American arrivals, Sakina Ejaz, a girl Mimi’s age who works as an assistant to her head cook father, couldn’t care less. Between her family’s poverty and her father’s diabetes, she has enough to worry about. But when Mimi agrees to help Sakina pass an English exam to achieve her dream of earning a scholarship and attending school for the first time, the two strike up a friendship greater than the differences in class and nationality that divide them. Together, they weather Mimi’s family secrets, Sakina’s pursuit of her dreams, and the sometimes-violent lead-up to an upcoming election. Faruqi’s descriptions of modern Karachi are rich with sensory detail, and her exploration of Mimi’s complicated feelings about her father make for a beautifully layered character arc. Sakina, however, feels defined almost entirely by her poverty, flattening her story and making her character’s development less satisfying.
A thoughtful portrait of friendship across class lines in modern Pakistan. (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294320-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read.
Will a bully always be a bully?
That’s the question eighth-grade football captain Chase Ambrose has to answer for himself after a fall from his roof leaves him with no memory of who and what he was. When he returns to Hiawassee Middle School, everything and everyone is new. The football players can hardly wait for him to come back to lead the team. Two, Bear Bratsky and Aaron Hakimian, seem to be special friends, but he’s not sure what they share. Other classmates seem fearful; he doesn’t know why. Temporarily barred from football because of his concussion, he finds a new home in the video club and, over time, develops a new reputation. He shoots videos with former bullying target Brendan Espinoza and even with Shoshanna Weber, who’d hated him passionately for persecuting her twin brother, Joel. Chase voluntarily continues visiting the nursing home where he’d been ordered to do community service before his fall, making a special friend of a decorated Korean War veteran. As his memories slowly return and he begins to piece together his former life, he’s appalled. His crimes were worse than bullying. Will he become that kind of person again? Set in the present day and told in the alternating voices of Chase and several classmates, this finding-your-middle-school-identity story explores provocative territory. Aside from naming conventions, the book subscribes to the white default.
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read. (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-338-05377-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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