Polly HorvathReviews

I'm not quite sure how to describe this book. It wasn't a fantasy but it reminded me of Mary Poppins as there were things that were not believable. Time travel and people floating after eating a salad, things like that. I enjoyed the book, but it was a bit on the sad side. At one point I just really wanted the poor kid to get some food!! It was entertaining, but I didn't love the messages in the book, the people for the most part all seemed really selfish and there didn't really seem to be any redemption in the end. For example here is one quote from the book: "Maybe bad behaviour is only what we think other people are going to think. Maybe there is no absolute. Maybe we worry that we are doing things wrong when they're not wrong at all. I feel like the whole universe is much looser, more spacious and open-ended than we knew. Oh, Rupert, I like everything so much better now! I was selfish, going ahead and doing what I wanted and the world didn't end. Instead I'm happy!" I'm not saying that it isn't okay to do things for yourself but I just felt there wasn't a lot of selflessness in the book.
There were 8 instances of blasphemy. I did find this book quite entertaining but I would recommend it as a read aloud book, that way you can discuss some of the themes in the book.

This book is about a girl whose parents disappear in the sea. She lives with different people. She experiences adventures with her teacher Mrs. Bowzer and her dog. This would be a good book for second grade.

Rly good

I enjoyed this book! As other reviewers have said it harkens back to the boxcar children for me. I love the Canadian setting and the characters were delightful!

Canada

Adversity

I picked up this book because it was set in British Columbia, Canada, where I live. As an adult, I was surprised at how much I genuinely enjoyed the book. It made me think of the days I read The Boxcar Children. I enjoyed reading about the sisters' distinct personalities as they approach their tricky new life, and I appreciated that it didn't feel like the author was being especially simple with her writing, (I can't remember when I last encountered "perspicacity.")

I would recommend this book for classroom as well as personal reading.½

Dark premise saved by excellent characters. The story setup is that a clutch (brace, pack, flock?) Of orphans is traveling to a new familial guardian, only to find that she has passed on. They decide to stay anyway, faking an adults' supervision. Hijinks ensue.

Hovath is very funny and combines some very quirky characters and ridiculous situations in this historical fiction book. I always tend to enjoy the humor and still feel set of by the mild, but unpleasant fat phobia I find in her books. Would i recommend: I can't decide. it has a feel good energy, but....

The first chapter showed such humorous potential. I loved the hippie parents and the kooky island community. This book lost me at the big butt joke in which Mr. Bunny cannot get over referring to Madeline's humongous bottom. I get that it is supposed to be funny for the 11 year olds reading it, but it feels uncomfortable every time because I am so aware of how easily girls can be negatively affected by this kind of joking. My librarian recommended it and says she has kid's for whom this is their favorite book, but I am giving it only two stars and will skim through to the end guilt free.

An endearing tale with wonderfully drawn characters. Parts of this were very predictable and the plot isn’t revolutionary but it’s very easy to root for these sisters. I suspect I would have benefited from reading the first book for maximum emotional engagement but this book works fine as a standalone since Horvath gives enough backstory to clue new readers in.

Thanks to Penguin Random House who kindly sent me a copy of the book for review.½

A very strange book. I liked it, but I think only becuase I'm partial to Horvath.

Everything on a Waffle is the story of a young girl named Primrose who lives in a small Canadian coastal town. Her parents go missing (at sea!) and she ends up living with her uncle Jack. She also frequents a local diner where everything is served on a waffle. Though I wouldn't say this story hinges on food, there's a recipe at the end of every chapter, which is fun if you're into cooking.

I was not super into the reader of the audio book. In fact, I have a hard time concentrating on audio books in general, even though I have no problem following radio programs. I don't understand why that is, but the long and short of it is I probably would've liked this more if I'd read it.

I really liked this a lot. It's about a 13-year-old girl named Ratchet who gets sent up to the Maine coast to live with her ancient eccentric aunts Tilly and Penpen AKA "those queer Menuto women" AKA "the blueberry ladies". I tagged it as adoption because I thought it was a great story about choosing your family as well as living intentionally, albeit in this case unusually. Horvath's sense of humor is wacky and dark and probably a little too grown up for 8- to 10-year-olds. There's death, abandonment, and killer bears within, but I was just tickled by it. This is a good one for readers who are mature and open-minded.

P.S. There's some swearing in this (not just blasphemy but the f-word a couple times).

I have been a fan of Polly Horvath since I was a child and read Everything on a Waffle. I enjoyed the first Pine Island book and was very grateful to receive "Pine Island Visitors" as a free giveaway. I read this book quickly as the writing flows very well. I find that Polly's books still interest me as an adult just as much as when I was a child. I love the characters although I enjoyed the first book's plot more interesting than this one. I hope there will be more stories about the children on Pine Island.

*I received a copy of this book through the Goodreads Giveaways program in exchange for an honest review*

You know when you read something so perfectly relevant it feels like the universe must have planted it in your path? That was this book for me.

More than a fun, relatable and easy-to-read middle-grade novel, Pine Island Visitors is a story about four resilient sisters and their adoptive guardian (read: grumpy old man) who open their home to fellow missionaries/church-goers and have a wild ride as hosts. This book does have some holiday elements so I'm thrilled to have read it in mid-December, however the themes, messages, and values are timeless.

This book is a sequel but it reads as a stand-alone (I hadn't read the first book but feel I still got to know all the characters quite well). No real "complaints" so the 4-star rating is simply this reader's opinion. But love the Can-Con (Canadian content) and character growth.

Like so many other middle-grade reads I really believe this book is for anyone in the double-digits - we forget how wise we are by 10 years old!!!½

I received this book as a Librarything Reviewer. I have read other books by Polly Horvath which I have enjoyed more than this one. Four sisters are orphaned when their parents are killed by a tsunami. They are afraid they'll be split up but finally a distant relative who lives on Pine Island agrees to take them. When they finally arrive they discover the house is ready for them but the aunt has also died. Afraid of being separated they try to fool the authorities into thinking they have a guardian. It works for awhile but eventually they are caught. Most of the time life for each of the girls is fairly normal at school and at home.I remember enjoying books about children surviving without parents around and the challenges they faced and I would probably have enjoyed this one at that age.

This is funny, sometimes absurd, and occasionally a little shocking, considering it's a children's book. But it's also rather sweet in its own way.

This probably wouldn't be appropriate for very sensitive kids, as there is mention of people and animals dying rather violently and animals being killed.

Note: God's name is misused, there's one instance of "hell" used as a curse word, and the kids use phrases like "shut up" occasionally.

I had high hopes for this book, but was disappointed.

The premise is cute: a young girl's parents are kidnapped by foxes, and she enlists the help of bunny detectives to find them.

There are some laugh-out-loud moments in this book, which is the only reason it gets two stars from me instead of just one. I read this to my nieces (ages 7 and 9) and they said it was "hilarious."

The biggest problem for me was that Horvath didn't seem to know which age group she was writing for. The illustrations are whimsical and appeal to younger children. The plot appeals to younger children. Yet, there are a ton of references that may be over the heads of even some middle schoolers, let alone younger kids. For example, Mr. Bunny goes off on a long tangent about why he doesn't like tipping waiters because their employers should be paying their wages; there's also talk about organically-sourced food and veganism (the girl's parents are hippies), why Prince Charles serves, even though he didn't ask for the honor, and many more instances that I simply can't remember right now. All of these things were clearly an attempt at cleverness and humor, but they fell flat and had absolutely zero to do with the plot. I got very frustrated with them.

On top of that, there was language used that I don't like seeing in children's books: crap, stupid, idiot, heck, shut up, God's name used in vain, and there was even talk of murder and "bodies buried in the basement." None of this is necessary in a children's book! I had to edit it on the fly while reading to my girls.

I would not recommend this book to anyone.

Thank you so much to LibraryThing and Tundra Books for this book in exchange for my honest review. This is the second book in the series and continues to follow the four sisters as they get used to life on the island. I really enjoyed the first book but I didn't enjoy this one as much. This book has very heavy themes of bullying and not by just one person, there were multiple examples of people being bullied. At one point one of the sisters just seems to give up and really has no interest in anything anymore. It was incredibly sad. One of the most frustrating things was that one of the bullies was an adult and the girls felt very helpless to do anything about it. I was so frustrated by this particular character Jo and how awful she was to the girls that I stayed up late reading just so I could finish the book in the hopes that it would have a happy ending. I wouldn't say that I enjoyed reading it though, I just wanted to finish it. I did think the author portrayed the bullying in a very real way though. Especially when talking about the person who's being bullied and when the sisters are talking about how angry they get and how they don't like who they're becoming I thought the author really got it. I think we can all relate to those feelings at one time or another. At one point one of the characters told the girls "...it was easier to be uber-polite with people you didn't particularly want to have anything to do with than it was to be rude. Rudeness binds you. Politeness creates distance." I never really thought about this but it's very true. If you're rude to someone you're actually engaging with them and developing a relationship, even if it's a negative one. This is maybe not the best way to go through life! Being uber-polite because you don't want to deal with people! But this did make me stop and think. There were seven instances of blasphemy and the heavy theme of bullying. The bullying is verbal and emotional it's not physical. Overall just not as enjoyable as the first one. The one character was just a bit too frustrating for me. This book was reviewed on the Literary Club Podcast Season 2 episode 33 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1984185

Thank you so much to LibraryThing and Tundra Books for this book in exchange for my honest review. I really enjoyed this book. It was about four sisters who lived with their parents in Borneo. Their parents went on vacation and were washed away in a tsunami. A woman from their church comes to stay while they try to find a family member to take them in. Finally their great aunt who lives on an island in BC offers. When they arrive they find that she also has passed away and they try to keep it a secret that they are living without a grown up. I really enjoyed the way the book was written. I liked the writing style as well as the fact that the loss of their parents was done very matter-of-factly. It's a middle school book and the loss of their parents wasn't a main theme so the author gets it out of the way in the first paragraph. I really enjoyed all four of the girls. They all had very different personalities and I found each of them to be likeable. I did feel really bad for Fiona (the oldest) at times as she was carrying so much responsibility. There are some joys and also some disappointments. There was an adult neighbour Al who I felt was a little over the top in constantly yelling at them and could have been toned down a little bit. There were four uses of blasphemy which I was a bit surprised about as it was a middle school book. Two of them were on the last page and I felt were unnecessary. Other than that no content concerns. Overall I found this to be an interesting and enjoyable read. This book was reviewed on the Literary Club Podcast Season 2 episode 33 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1984185

This is the second in a series but it does well as a stand alone with enough of the backstory explained to make it make sense.

It's a story mostly about family (siblings) banding together to overcome adversity and find the courage and strength in each other to stand up for themselves and advocate for themselves after having lost their parents. It's a lesson we hope all children will learn to help them become independent and self-assured adults.

Orphaned children living on their own is always a popular trope, from E. Nesbit's Harding's Luck to the Boxcar Children. Pine Island Home is a worthy successor to these classics and will no doubt become a classic in its own right. I've often wondered in recent years how the invention of electronics would affect children's literature: so many plots would collapse if the kids had a phone. In this book, we're firmly in the 21st century and the main impact of technology is to give the poor children more bills to pay. Their life is immeasurably more complicated than kids in earlier decades trying to evade the authorities: their great-aunt (who died suddenly while the unaccompanied children were en route from Borneo) had a lawyer who administers her estate, knows of the children and wants to regularize their status, sending them countless phone and email messages about "guardian papers" and "citizenship" which the oldest child, 14 year old Fiona, doggedly ignores. And the younger girls' school principal, drawing on her own memories of having been a 15 year old runaway, acts as a background support -- as long as she can maintain plausible deniability. The web of their prevarications becomes more and more tangled until a happy ending seems unlikely, but Polly Horvath pulls off a satisfying and believable resolution to the kids' difficulties.

The School Library Journal's conclusion that this book "deserves a place in most libraries" seems to sum it up. I would recommend it for any library catering to children of the age range of the McCready girls (8 through 14), or to families. Including my home library: this one is a keeper!½

I enjoyed this book about four orphaned sisters taken in by their aunt only to realize upon arrival that she has recently passed away. In order to avoid being taken by social services the girls pretend their grumpy next door neighbour is their new guardian. Though there were many times I had to suspend my disbelief reading this book, I did find myself rooting for the McReady sisters and enjoyed reading about them.

Fiona and her three sisters find themselves orphans when their parents are swept away in a tsunami. Desperately trying to find a relative to take them in and avoid being separated by Child Services, the girls are relieved when their great aunt in British Columbia, Canada agrees to adopt them. The four travel from Borneo to British Columbia only to discover that their Aunt too is now deceased. What unwinds is a skillful plot to convince a grumpy neighbour, Al, to act as their guardian so that they may remain together. I enjoyed the dynamic between the girls and Al. A great story about the resilience of children and their ability to con adult authority figures. I would easily recommend this book for ages 9 to 13; however, the style of writing is somewhat old-fashioned (I can't quite put my finger on it) so may not appeal to those wanting a fast-paced adventure.