Those readers ready to graduate from Judy Moody and Junie B. Jones will find a kindred spirit in Sophie.
Spirited Sophie is back for a fourth tale in this highly readable series (Happy Birthday, Sophie Hartley, 2010, etc.), trying to walk the line between growing up and holding onto the fun and innocence of childhood.
Things are changing all around 10-year-old Sophie: Her mother seems irritable with her family all the time; older sister Nora has developed a distressing obsession over the state of her hair; and annoying classmate Destiny is determined to prove that Sophie and her friends are immature babies since they do not show interest in the movie shown to the fifth-grade girls. Greene captures the trials and tribulations of growing up in a loving but often bickering family through humorous details and a perfect mix of emotional outbursts, earnest worries and deadpan dialogue. Good thing Sophie can depend on her loyal friends Jenna and Alice to get her through her most recent snafu: a promised talk delivered by her mother, a nurse, about “P-U-berty” that will one-up the obnoxious Destiny. But when her mother is unexpectedly unable to give it, what will she do? Help comes from the most unexpected places. Older brother Thad provides a laugh-out-loud explanation of hormones and glands, Nora softens to offer advice, and the new yoga classes Sophie has been taking help her with self-control.
Those readers ready to graduate from Judy Moody and Junie B. Jones will find a kindred spirit in Sophie. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-97652-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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