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THE GRAVE ARTIST

Never stilted or clumsy, this debut novel reads like the work of a far more experienced writer.

Awards & Accolades

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Clare, a teenager reeling from her parents’ divorce, investigates her strange new artistic obsession in Johnson’s young-adult paranormal mystery.

Sixteen-year-old Clare’s life has been recently upended: After her parents’ divorce, she moved with her mom to a downscale school and neighborhood. Now she’s seeing a shrink after some binge drinking over the summer, and she can’t stop compulsively drawing skulls with wings. Her shrink believes it’s delayed grief over her father leaving the family, but Clare isn’t so sure—especially when she finds the exact same skull image on an old gravestone for a girl named Samantha. Eerie parallels exist between Clare and Samantha, who died at 16 under mysterious circumstances in 1798. Worse, Clare seems to be re-experiencing that death in vivid, frightening dreams and visions. Does Samantha want something, and what? With the help of art-class friend Neil, whose talent, gentle ways and dark coloring appeal to her, Clare investigates what really happened in 1798. At the same time, she works on repairing her fractured sense of self in the wake of the divorce, forging new understandings with her family and finding a real friend—and more—in Neil. Johnson presents a believable, multilayered heroine whose narration is lively and insightful. Clare can be sarcastic and dramatic like most teenagers, but she’s also thoughtful and observant. Reflecting on her drunken head injury last summer, Clare considers Samantha’s death: “A girl my age, on the cusp of the unknown. A girl who deserved more than to shatter on a bed of rocks, before her life stood a fighting chance of getting started.” Throughout the novel, Clare advances in empathetic understanding while remaining very much a teenager. Clare and Neil’s sweet, low-key romance is skillfully integrated into the investigation, and it even possesses interesting parallels to events in 1798. Even minor characters, like Vince, the burnout house painter, come alive. Characters speak in natural sounding dialogue, as when Vince, looking at some mysterious symbols, says: “That looks like a bad trip I had once in an Arby’s.” The action is brisk, with a surprising but believable twist near the end.

Never stilted or clumsy, this debut novel reads like the work of a far more experienced writer.

Pub Date: March 23, 2012

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Amazon Digital Services

Review Posted Online: April 19, 2012

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WRECKING BALL

From the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series , Vol. 14

Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.

The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.

When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.

Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Amulet/Abrams

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019

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LITTLE BLUE TRUCK'S CHRISTMAS

Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...

The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.

The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.

Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3

Page Count: 24

Publisher: HMH Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014

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