Cool Reads

Wildwood, Tennessee’s own Olive Miracle Martin is a girl of great, sparkly confidence and passions.She loves her oddball family, church, writing, birding, her wheelchairs, and the idea of attending Macklemore Middle School after years of being home-schooled. Macklemore is the land of her hopes, full of potential friends and wild adventures, yet her osteogenesis imperfecta makes the prospect a challenge. While navigating new social mores and finding her niche within the quirky theater crowd, Olive and intrepid new friend Grace Cho hunt for the local hummingbird said to grant one fantastical wish. In a town where vividly described magic is taken as a point of fact and white feathers fall from the sky like snow, Olive’s fairy-tale wish is for bones like steel, not glass. Now she must contend with the question of whether she should—or even wants to—be anyone but who she already is. Olive can lean a tad pitch-perfect, and the world Lloyd builds is at times saccharine, but the energetic first-person narration, interspersed with Olive’s thoughts in free verse, is full of bold personality. Refreshingly, her obstacles don’t come from being a wheelchair user but from navigating an inaccessible world. Her grappling with fears and bold dreams offers a rare depiction of physical disability that is allowed to be both complicated and empowering. The book follows a White default; Grace is described as East Asian.A spirited tale of self-belief. (author's note) (Fiction. 8-12)
KIRKUS REVIEWS

In the end, Korman’s latest is about tolerance and forgiveness, and that can never be a bad thing—though not all the strong reactions it’s going to provoke will be positive. As related by several young narrators, some of whom turn out to be unreliable, the appearance of a swastika splashed onto the wall of a small Colorado town’s middle school kicks off instant responses that begin with units of “tolerance education” in school. As further swastikas appear but no culprit can be found, a massive effort to create a six-million-link paper chain as an expression of solidarity and remembrance begins. Local feelings vary, but those of two narrators take center stage. Dana, a recent arrival and the school’s only Jewish student, is moderately bemused and annoyed by the way she’s suddenly being treated differently. Prankster and star jock Link, on the other hand, is so shocked to learn that his grandmother is a Holocaust survivor that he contacts a rabbi and asks for a bar mitzvah. Further controversy stirs as the national attention the town draws revives long-suppressed memories of a “Night of a Thousand Flames,” when, 40 years before, the then-strong KKK lit up the county with burning crosses. Bringing the past into the present and moving beyond pure emotional manipulation, this wrenching story offers much to ponder and few, if any, easy answers.— John Peters
Booklist - Star Review

Ellie is doing her best, but it never seems to be enough: not for her mom, who insists Ellie’s weight is something to be fixed; not for her peers, who taunt her with unimaginably cruel words; and not even for herself. She doesn’t mind being fat, but she does mind how she’s treated for it. Now, as the threat of bariatric surgery grows, Ellie must find it within herself to stand up to the ones who pushed her to create the Fat Girl Rules—including herself. Fipps bursts onto the middle-grade scene with her debut, a verse novel that shines because of Ellie’s keen and emotionally striking observations. As she draws readers in with her smart and succinct voice, Ellie navigates the difficult map of knowing she deserves better treatment while struggling with the conflict that’s necessary to achieve it. Fipps hands her young narrator several difficult life lessons, including how to self-advocate, how not to internalization of the words of others, and what it means to defend yourself. Ellie’s story will delight readers who long to see an impassioned young woman seize an unapologetic victory.— Abby Hargreaves
Booklist - Star Review

Deftly balancing four teens’ perilous, climate change–related experiences, Gratz (Ground Zero) specifically centers scenarios around the earth’s warming by two degrees. With urgency, the tense narrative alternates between three story lines, following 13-year-old Norwegian American Akira Kristiansen, who rides her horse through the Sierra Nevada range in California as a wildfire spreads; white 13-year-old Owen Mackenzie and his Mushkegowuk best friend George Gruyère in Churchill, Manitoba—the “polar bear capital of the world”—who are attacked by a hungry mother polar bear after they get too close to her cubs; and Puerto Rican seventh grader Natalie Torres, who must evacuate as a hurricane heads for Miami. Gratz renders pulse-pounding ecological tales and high-stakes calamity with the brisk pacing of a thriller, interweaving the cast’s thoughtfully wrought plights while ensuring that all survival-oriented strands prove equally urgent. This gripping, timely tale offers a meditative call to action about a global crisis, culminating in a tidy, if didactic, resolution. Ages 8–12. (Oct.)
Publishers Weekly