Gino’s second middle-grade novel shows a well-meaning white girl stumbling through difficult issues with compassion.
Twelve-year-old Jilly has a lot going on. She’s crushing on Profound, a Deaf black boy she meets in a chat room dedicated to her favorite fantasy series. Her newborn sister might be deaf. Her white parents gloss over news reports of unarmed black youth killed by police, but her aunt Alicia, a black woman married to Jilly’s mom’s sister, encourages Jilly to not ignore racism. Jilly wants to do the right thing, but that’s harder than she realizes. She’s excited to talk to Profound about her sister, but he doesn’t like being reduced to only one of his identities. She learns to confront microaggressions at family holidays. She wants her parents to embrace having a deaf child but doesn’t realize that Deaf culture and identity are more than just learning a few signs. Gino tackles all this and much more with grace, clarity, and thoughtfulness. There are occasional hiccups in the flow and awkward moments, but readers learn a lot along with Jilly and her mistakes in this engrossing and satisfying read. Gino describes their intention in an author’s note: “this book is consciously written for white people as a catalyst to talk about modern racism and police violence in the United States” and to teach them “about their privilege and how to support marginalized people in their lives.”
A necessary and rewarding addition to any middle-grade collection. (Fiction. 8-14)Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-545-95624-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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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. 19, 2019
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing, humorous, and vitally important graphic novel that should be required reading in every middle school in...
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Jordan Banks takes readers down the rabbit hole and into his mostly white prep school in this heartbreakingly accurate middle-grade tale of race, class, microaggressions, and the quest for self-identity.
He may be the new kid, but as an African-American boy from Washington Heights, that stigma entails so much more than getting lost on the way to homeroom. Riverdale Academy Day School, located at the opposite end of Manhattan, is a world away, and Jordan finds himself a stranger in a foreign land, where pink clothing is called salmon, white administrators mistake a veteran African-American teacher for the football coach, and white classmates ape African-American Vernacular English to make themselves sound cool. Jordan’s a gifted artist, and his drawings blend with the narrative to give readers a full sense of his two worlds and his methods of coping with existing in between. Craft skillfully employs the graphic-novel format to its full advantage, giving his readers a delightful and authentic cast of characters who, along with New York itself, pop off the page with vibrancy and nuance. Shrinking Jordan to ant-sized proportions upon his entering the school cafeteria, for instance, transforms the lunchroom into a grotesque Wonderland in which his lack of social standing becomes visually arresting and viscerally uncomfortable.
An engrossing, humorous, and vitally important graphic novel that should be required reading in every middle school in America. (Graphic fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-269120-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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