A tense, superstitious, hardworking boy learns that luck is generated from the inside out.
Ari Fish, 12, the younger son in a supportive but educationally ambitious family, is obsessed with soccer and luck. Before he plays a game, he goes through a series of obsessive rituals designed to maximize his good fortune. His best friend, Jerry Mac MacDonald, is cut from a different cloth entirely. The son of an indifferent single mother and unknown father, Mac, who is their team captain, social top-dog and star player, is loosey-goosey cool, a bundle of pure natural talent. Mac and Ari’s friendship is tested when a girl, Parker Llewellyn, the daughter of a hard-driving soccer dad, makes it onto the team. In addition to sexism, this event brings out other themes, including the value of preparation and the importance of putting your team first. After an overlong set-up, matters are brought to a head when Ari’s lucky soccer card disappears from his backpack. Mac and Parker each accuse the other of stealing it, dividing Ari’s loyalties and putting him in a tough social and ethical position. It’s a credible middle-grade dilemma, but Aronson couples it with some unnecessary drama involving Ari’s firefighter brother. The play-by-play sports action is nicely integrated, though, and it enhances the plotline. The novel ends on a high though bittersweet note; the right thing won’t please everyone. Solid. (Fiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: June 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8037-3520-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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