One day Freddie Ramos comes home from school and finds a strange box just for him. What's inside? ZAPATO POWER-shoes that change Freddie's life by giving him super speed! But what will Freddie do with his fast new skills? - (Albert Whitman & Co)

One day Freddie Ramos comes home from school and finds a strange box just for him. What's inside? ZAPATO POWER-shoes that change Freddie's life by giving him super speed! But what will Freddie do with his fast new skills? Weird things are happening at the Starwood Park Apartments where he lives, and his friends at school need his help. Is Freddie Ramos ready to be a hero? In this imaginative story by Jacqueline Jules, an ordinary boy in a city neighborhood learns how to use his new-found powers for good. Illustrations by Miguel Benitez lend just a touch of comic-book style to this chapter book adventure.

Freddie Ramos finds a mysterious package outside his Starwood Park Apartments home containing sneakers that allow him to run faster than a train, and inspire him to perform heroic deeds. - (Baker & Taylor)

Freddie finds a mysterious package outside his apartment containing sneakers that allow him to run faster than a train, and inspire him to perform heroic deeds. - (Baker & Taylor)

One day Freddie Ramos comes home from school and finds a strange box just for him. What's inside? ZAPATO POWER-shoes that change Freddie's life by giving him super speed! But what will Freddie do with his fast new skills? Weird things are happening at the Starwood Park Apartments where he lives, and his friends at school need his help. Is Freddie Ramos ready to be a hero? In this imaginative new story by Jacqueline Jules, an ordinary boy in a city neighborhood learns how to use his new-found powers for good. Illustrations by Miguel Benitez lend just a touch of comic-book style to this chapter book adventure. - (Independent Publishing Group)

Freddie finds a mysterious package outside his apartment containing sneakers that allow him to run faster than a train, and inspire him to perform heroic deeds. - (Albert Whitman & Co)

Horn Book Guide Reviews

Freddie Ramos receives a pair of special sneakers that give him super speed. He uses this power to retrieve a classmate's lunch, identify the perpetrator of graffiti, and ultimately discover the source of the shoes themselves. With its cartoon-style black-and-white illustrations and mostly breezy text, this book is tailor-made for the chapter book set. Copyright 2010 Horn Book Guide Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

When a mysterious gift turns out to be superpowered purple sneakers, Freddie Ramos looks for ways to be a superhero. Using his super speed, he fetches a library book. He cleans a wall and a sidewalk where someone had written a bathroom word, and he saves a small dog. Designed for early readers, this chapter book includes frequent black-and-white cartoon illustrations featuring kids with outsized round heads. At one point two comics-style pages interrupt the text to show Freddie searching for the dog. The few Spanish words establish the boy's ethnicity but will be understood in context. Unusually, for the genre, the author works in a back story for her characters: Freddie's soldier father was killed two years earlier; his mother has recently finished school and gotten a better job and nicer apartment for herself and her son. Episodic in nature, the narrative leaves open the possibility for sequels when Freddie discovers the sneaker inventor. An unusually appealing early chapter book. (Fiction. 6-9) Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

School Library Journal Reviews

Gr 2–3—Freddie has a single, overworked mom; a soldier father who never came home from war; and an unstable urban landscape in which to play. He finds a pair of winged sneakers that let him run so fast no one can see him, and as he tries to solve the mystery of the shoes' origins, he finds ways to be a hero to those around him. Black-and-white comic-book-style illustrations boost the story's energy and set Freddie up as a superhero. However, the impact of his speed falls a little flat as the author gets caught up in introducing the characters, leaving the bulk of the adventure for the ending. Young readers may lose patience waiting to get to the action. While Freddie fills a gap in most early chapter book collections as a Hispanic hero for new and reluctant readers, most children won't be clamoring for a sequel.—Sarah Townsend, Norfolk Public Library, VA