An eye-opening, inspiring story of growing up, facing obstacles, and chasing your dreams anyway.
A Japanese American girl pursues her dreams amid the racism of middle school in 1987 Kansas.
Twelve-year-old Aoi Inoue has big dreams. She dreams of playing basketball in the NBA. She dreams of becoming an actress and winning an Oscar. Being one of the only Asian kids isn’t easy, however, and facing endless hassles with her name, she reinvents herself as Annie Enoway. An exciting opportunity arises when the local theater puts on the play Annie—but is it realistic to hope to be cast as the famous redhead? When seventh grade starts, Annie makes the basketball team and gets a more prominent role than she expected in the school play, The King and I, but that in turn brings accusations from peers of an unfair advantage based on race. As Annie takes part in all these activities, she keeps encountering people with opinions and biases about who she is and what she can do as an Asian girl. Navigating middle school also includes the complications of a first crush, strict teachers, and changing friendships. This is a captivating coming-of-age story of determination, as bilingual Annie begins to understand the racism she, her brother, and her immigrant parents face daily. Brown eloquently addresses the history of Asian immigration, microaggressions, the model minority myth, stereotyping, and the impact of the lack of representation.
An eye-opening, inspiring story of growing up, facing obstacles, and chasing your dreams anyway. (author's note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-301716-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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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