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SHAKING UP THE HOUSE

Delightfully silly and enjoyable.

Two sets of sisters battle to be the best pranksters.

The López sisters, 12-year-old Winnie and 11-year-old Ingrid, have lived in the White House for the past eight years. As daughters of the first Latinx president, they’ve carried the burden of being perfect role models as well as they could despite Winnie’s impulsivity and Ingrid’s joker side. However, with only seven weeks left in their father’s presidency and the new first family staying as guests at the White House, the López sisters wholly embrace the tradition of pranking the incoming administration. With 12-year-old identical twins Zora and Skylar Williams moving in as the daughters of the first Black woman president, there are plenty of opportunities to perform elaborate jokes. The Williams twins retaliate with gusto, and soon the pranks escalate, causing trouble in the White House, endangering historical artifacts and First Ferret Lafayette, and leaving Secret Service agents scrambling to do their jobs. The girls must learn to restrain themselves before they do irreparable damage to their families’ images and their parents’ legacies. The story is told through chapters alternating among the four girls’ perspectives, giving a glimpse into their struggles to express their personal identities and the added pressures of being children of color in the public sphere. Readers who enjoy mischief will find this an amusing and instructive read in the art of pranking.

Delightfully silly and enjoyable. (Fiction. 8-12)

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-06-297072-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020

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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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CHARLOTTE'S WEB

The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...

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A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.

Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.

The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952

ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952

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