Sarah Weeks

Sleuthing pie-oriented adventure set in Ipswitch, PA in 1955. Love the crabby cat, the strong and thoughtful heroine, and the way Aunt Polly chose to live her life. Particularly delighted that Alice learned the real, be true to yourself lesson better than how to make a perfect piecrust. Sweet and satisfying.

You couldn′t really tell about Mama′s brain just from looking at her, but it was obvious as soon as she spoke. She had a high voice, like a little girl′s, and she only knew 23 words. I know this for a fact, because we kept a list of the things Mama said tacked to the inside of the kitchen cabinet. Most of the words were common ones, like good and more and hot, but there was one word only my mother said: soof.

Although she lives an unconventional lifestyle with her mentally disabled show more mother and their doting neighbour, Bernadette, Heidi has a lucky streak that has a way of pointing her in the right direction. When a mysterious word in her mother′s vocabulary begins to haunt her, Heidi′s thirst for the truth leads her on a cross-country journey in search of the secrets of her past. show less

Told from the alternating perspectives of Joe Sylvester and Ravi Suryanarayanan, two fifth-graders at Albert Einstein Elementary School in New Jersey, this engrossing middle-grade novel addresses issues of immigration and belonging, bullying and friendship, and perception and reality, when it comes to the people around us. Newly arrived in America with his family, Ravi is horrified to find that his first day of school does not go as planned: the teacher and students have trouble show more understanding his accent, the students laugh at his mannerisms (standing when answering a question), and he, a boy who won academic awards back home in Bangalore, is sent to the Resource Room for extra help with English! Joe, newly bereft of companionship after his only two friends move away, is more vulnerable than ever to the bullying of Dillon Samreen, who has always made him a target, and who is the most popular boy in the school. Facing a number of challenges - Joe has APD, Auditory Processing Disorder, a neurological condition in which a person has trouble filtering background noises, and understanding instructions; he is also much larger than the other children, with a high metabolism that makes him hungry all the time - Joe makes an easy target. As Ravi works through who is and is not a possible friend in this new world, Joe must contend with Dillon's bullying, and the fact that his mother is working as a lunch monitor at his school. Do these two have more in common than they think...?

The answer to that is immediately obvious to the reader of course, but it is still a pleasure to watch Ravi and Joe work through their parallel struggles. I found Save Me a Seat quite involving, finishing it over the course of three subway rides. A debut for Gita Varadarajan, who paired with her writing teacher Sarah Weeks, a prolific children's author and an instructor at The New School, to write the story, it is my first book from either author, but hopefully not my last. I found both boys' narratives quite interesting, finding Joe the more sympathetic character overall, but Ravi the more compelling, as he is the one who grows the most. His story highlights a number of important points, all handled fairly well I thought. Ravi's instinctive feeling of solidarity with the only other student of Indian descent in the class, even though he is an ABCD (American Born Confused Desi), is challenged by the experiences he has, which teach him that sometimes the best friends can be made outside your particular identity group (however defined). His own complicity in the mistreatment of others, back home in India, also becomes apparent to him, as he finds himself taking the place of the school 'loser.' There is no better teacher than experience, as they say. Of course Joe's tale is engaging as well, but I think he doesn't have as far to come as Ravi: he already knows who Dillon Samreen is, and what his own 'place' in the school social order is. Recommended to middle-grade readers looking for tales of school, belonging, bullying, friendship, and finding yourself. show less

The way neighbor Bernadette described it to Heidi, Heidi’s mother’s brain was a broken machine with bent or missing parts. How much so?

…if we hadn’t had Bernadette, we’d have been in big trouble. Mama didn’t know things. She didn’t understand numbers at all. She couldn’t tell time or use money or the telephone. She only knew one color, blue, and although she could recognize a few letters A and S and sometimes H, she couldn’t read, not even her own name

Actually, Heidi’s show more mom doesn’t even know her own name, telling Bernadette when she showed up at a Reno, Nev., apartment with a week-old baby named Heidi; Heidi’s mom insists her name is So Be It. So Heidi didn’t know anything about her own origins, or her mother’s, either — not even Heidi’s own last name, birthplace or her own birthday.

When Heidi finds an old camera and develops the film, she sees a chance to find out who she is — but how can a girl not yet 13 years old get to Liberty, N.Y., where the answers lay?

What an amazing story! Unique, sad, joyful, inspiring. This is a children’s book that adults will adore; like The Little Prince, the adults may well enjoy the novel more than its middle-grade target audience. Five shining stars! show less