This intermittently funny book offers likable characters, but it lacks Stauffacher’s customary expert touch.
To her horror, an 11-year-old tomboy prankster is forced to take an etiquette class and learn the rules of polite society.
Girls who want to be “something wacko” like “a princess or a movie star” might find the rules of etiquette useful, but Cassidy, Stauffacher’s irrepressible, obnoxious, but still strongly sympathetic heroine, has a more original goal: she longs to be a hobo. And she’s not even the most eccentric character in Stauffacher’s quirky new comedy with a message. Cassidy’s 15-year-old sister, Magda, is fascinated with decomposition—a great present for her would be a dead rodent—and Cassidy’s best friend, Jack, wants to be a stuntman. Although Stauffacher keeps the tone light and humorous in this first-person novel, personal growth is still undeniably painful. In particular, Cassidy, on the cusp of adolescence, has to deal with how the changes in her and Jack’s bodies affect their feelings and behavior. Sadly, after the players and their conflicts are laid out, the book seems to get stuck; the etiquette lessons are not as interminable as they feel to Cassidy, but they don’t have much momentum either. When it comes, the happy ending, though welcome, is a tad hard to buy psychologically.
This intermittently funny book offers likable characters, but it lacks Stauffacher’s customary expert touch. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-375-83097-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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
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