A compelling book that’s here to stay.
His family and friends in Panamá have big dreams for Danilo, but he isn’t sure they’re his dreams.
Set in 1990 just after the United States’ Operation Just Cause, an invasion centered on ousting dictator Manuel Noriega from Panamá, this novel centers on Danilo Osorio Jr. After a knee injury sustained while playing baseball led to him losing his construction job, Danilo’s father left for the States. But the calls and letters have stopped coming, and he’s not sending home any money. After the Osorios’ apartment in El Chorrillo is damaged in an airstrike, Danilo, his mother, and his younger sister, Amara, are forced to relocate to a refugee center in an airplane hangar. All seems lost until Danilo is recruited to play on a youth baseball team in California for a couple of months. Danilo isn’t sure he cares about baseball anymore, but he realizes this might be a chance to contact Papá. Burgess skillfully covers a lot of ground in her representation of events that are seldom discussed in U.S. history books but that devastated Panamá and its people. Danilo’s journey is fast paced, heartfelt, and heartbreaking. The trauma, dislocation, and devastation weighing heavily on him are palpable as he tries to adjust. His new teammates, who are predominantly white, are dismissive and exclude him socially; he also faces a slew of culturally insensitive and ignorant remarks thrown at him as a Black Panamanian boy in the U.S.
A compelling book that’s here to stay. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063159662
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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