Another hilarious and sincere look at a middle schooler’s search for her squad.
Christina and her friends are back, this time trying out for the ninth grade cheerleading squad.
It’s 1994 in small-town Texas, and Christina’s second semester of eighth grade is almost perfect. Her classes are interesting, her friends are great, and she’s looking forward to a fun art project, but she still longs to be a cheerleader. Christina and her two best friends, Megan and Leanne, learn all the routines and dream of what being cheerleaders would mean. When three spots for the ninth grade squad open up, a more confident Christina and her friends go through the intense tryouts again. But Christina’s life falls apart when she overhears her parents talking about divorce. Even though she’s going through a taxing time, she puts on a smile and pushes on with cheer, hoping to make her life movie-perfect. While cheerleading is a major component of Soontornvat’s funny, relatable, stand-alone graphic memoir companion to The Tryout (2022), the story also explores divorce, friend drama, a first crush, racism, and microaggressions. As someone who’s Thai and white and feels like she doesn’t fully belong to any one community, Christina continues to struggle with identity, especially after her parents’ split. Pranks and jokes add levity to this emotional story. Cacao’s bright, sharply rendered illustrations highlight the characters’ expressions and add context about the ’90s and the various cultural elements.
Another hilarious and sincere look at a middle schooler’s search for her squad. (author’s note, photos) (Graphic memoir. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781338741322
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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
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