Skip to main content

The Spotted Dog Last Seen

By
The Spotted Dog Last Seen
by Jessica Scott Kerrin
Groundwood Books, 2013.  205 pgs.  Fiction

     Derek, Pascal, and Merrilee are three Grade Six students at Queensview Elementary school who have been assigned "cemetery duty" as their senior service project. Pascal and Merrilee think working in the graveyard will be fun, but Derek is worried about intensifying his nightmares--bad dreams of the day when he saw his young neighbor friend get hit by a car and killed. Soon the three are learning lots of things about headstones and funerary practice, and are also trying to solve the mystery of library books filled with clues to what's inside a locker time capsule.  How Derek comes to terms with his sorrows under the sometimes grumpy tutelage of Mr. Creelman and the Twillingate Cemetery Brigade is the burden of this gentle tale.  Derek provides comic relief with his hobby of printing T-shirt slogans.  For the school secretary:  "Not here to make friends."  In the end, two other people who were part of Derek's past along with Derek himself find the will to go on after the three children crack the code.  One of the New York Public Library's choices for best books of the year, The Spotted Dog Last Seen is a low key but memorable story about getting the help one needs in unlikely places.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stand Tall by Joan Bauer

By DeeDee
Stand Tall By Siena Siegel by Joan Bauer Putnam, 2002, 182 pgs Realistic Fiction Tree is 12 years old and over 6 feet tall. That would be great if he were a basketball player, but he is not. Dealing with his unusual size is not Tree's only challenge. Tree's parents have recently gone through a divorce, and his grandfather has had his leg amputated as the result of an old Vietnam War injury. The strength of this book is the characterizations. All of the main characters are dimensional and sympathetic. Bauer sets the characters in real and often funny family situations. Best of all is the character of Tree. He is boy with a heart to match his stature. This is a great book for boys or girls ages 9-12, as a read aloud or for individual reading. This book could also be a good Rx book for children whose families are going through divorce, or for anyone who feels like they don't fit in.
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Cincinnati Lee, Curse Breaker

By
  Cincinnati Lee, Curse Breaker By Heidi Heilig New York: Greenwillow Books, 2025. Fiction. 291 pages. Thanks to Cincinnati Lee's no good, dirty rotten, artifact stealing great great great grandfather, Cincinnati's family is now cursed and Cincinnati feels like it's up to her to break the curse. Which involves trying to steal the artifacts back from museums that her grandfather robbed from graves and archeological sites around the world and return them to their countries of origin. But when Cincinnati's first artifact stealing mission goes awry, she decides it might be more effective to steal an all-powerful artifact herself that she can use to break the curse - The Spear of Destiny. Unfortunately her race for the spear will pit her against art smugglers and thieves intent on finding the ancient artifact themselves. If you are looking for an Indiana Jones read-alike, this is the perfect for you! Heavy on the adventure with similar levels of mysticism to those seen in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more