Skip to main content

Review: Olivetti

By

 


Olivetti
By Allie Millington
New York: Feiwel and Friends. 2024. 249 pages.

A typewriter's life is not always as easy as it looks. Sure it sits on a desk a lot of the time and it appears to be doing nothing but the stories that have been typed from their keys are important and inspiring. A typewriter's job is to keep memories alive and Olivetti just happens to be such a typewriter who sits on the desk of Beatrice Brindle. He can remember everything that was typed on him and he feels strongly that "memories are like heartbeats. They keep things alive. They make us who we are." 

Olivetti and young Ernest Brindle, who is a quiet, shy boy who loves reading the Oxford English Dictionary, work together to tell their story. In alternating narration, Olivetti and Ernest try to solve the mysterious disappearance of Beatrice, Ernest's mother and Olivetti's owner.  Ernest feels like it's his fault that his mother disappeared and he makes it his quest to find her. Along the way he finds two allies who help him, a girl named Quinn, who likes to go dumpster diving and Olivetti, his mother's typewriter. The search for Beatrice takes the friends all over town as they look for clues. Olivetti's job is to type out everything Beatrice ever typed on him. While Quinn and Ernest then take those typed pages and look for clues. Working together the three friends begin to piece together the mystery of what happened to Beatrice. 

This sweet, powerful story is perfect for older middle grade readers, but beware, you may finish the book and find yourself wanting your very own typewriter.




Memories are like heartbeats. They keep things alive. They make us who we are.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Review: A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall

By
A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall By Jasmine Warga New York: Harper, 2024. Fiction. 211 pages. A painting has been stolen from the Penelope L. Brooks Museum and sixth-grader Rami Ahmed is worried he's the main suspect. His mother works at the museum as the lead custodian and Rami spends a lot of time hanging out at the museum while she works. On the day the painting went missing, the only people there were the security guard Ed, the cleaning crew, and Rami. Then, a mysterious girl appears in the museum. She floats around from room to room and only Rami can see her -- and she looks exactly like the girl from the missing painting. To prove his innocence and help figure out who the floating girl is, Rami partners up with an aspiring sleuth at school named Veda and the two dive into unexpected situations as they try to solve the mystery. This is a cozy mystery that is focused mostly on characters and ambiance and only a little on the mystery itself. Don't read this book if yo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Amazing Generation

By
The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World Written by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price  Illustrated by Cynthia Yuan Cheng New York: Rocky Pond Books, 2025. Informational. 226 pages.  In a kid-friendly adaptation of his best-selling book, The Anxious Generation , Jonathan Haidt teams up with Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone , to bring the power of good information directly to the hands of those that this issue affects most directly — kids on the cusp of getting their own smartphones. The book presents information about the drawbacks of having a smartphone and social media too soon in clear and easy-to-understand language, with eye-catching graphics and pop-outs. Throughout the book, quotes from real teens and young adults, called screen "rebels" by the authors, emphasize the points the authors are trying to make. Fictional characters are featured throughout in a graphic novel story, which further emphasizes the po...
Post a Comment
Read more