Two sisters, one fairy-tale conspiracy, a richly imagined world, and stakes high enough to keep pages turning.
When a “mysterious snowstorm” kills her parents and a cursed plague called Rapunzelitis traps her 14-year-old sister, Anastasie, in an ancient stone tower, brave 12-year-old Madalon d’Ascolat refuses to accept the official story.
Madalon, who’s petite with dark hair and eyes, schemes to free Anastasie by solving the 700-year-old curse of Rapunzelitis with the help of Maggie, an Oracle with wrinkled “cedar-brown” skin, and Dorian, a blue-eyed troll boy with pale skin and dark curls, who proves to be far more than he seems. Meanwhile, the thoughtful, quietly suffering Anastasie, who has golden skin and “fiery hair,” navigates captivity and gradually discovers her own formidable power, with only sardonic Lana, the girl in her mirror, for company. The enchanted tower is original and captivating: a sentient presence that redecorates Anastasie’s room with gossamer curtains and a rose-petal hammock to lift her spirits. The alternating chapters give equal weight to both white-presenting sisters’ third-person perspectives. Rogers weaves in Rumpelstiltskin—reimagined as Rapunzel’s part-fairy suitor, who’s capable of spinning straw into gold; his capture by the villainous troll king Mathieu sets the mystery in motion. Also making appearances are the Knights of the Round Table and the Lady of Shalott. There’s much to love in this magic-filled tale with two sisters at its heart that braids beloved classic stories together into something altogether its own.
Two sisters, one fairy-tale conspiracy, a richly imagined world, and stakes high enough to keep pages turning. (map) (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9780316583121
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An entertaining take on family values, Wimpy Kid style.
A summer vacation turns out to be anything but relaxing for Greg and a teeming horde of Heffleys.
Gramma declines the offer of a grand birthday celebration, saying that “what would make her REALLY happy is if everyone else went to Ruttyneck Island”—though she prepares individual packs of her legendary meatballs. (“You knew exactly how much Gramma likes you by how many meatballs you got.”) A gaggle of Heffley relatives and a dog stuff themselves into a small beach house, where overcrowding, personality conflicts, and simmering resentments become just some of the ingredients in a rolling boil of sitcom-style catastrophes, not to mention questionable decisions ranging from leaving the kids to make dinner unsupervised to labeling a cooler “HUMAN ORGANS” to keep random passersby from helping themselves. As usual, Greg supplies the setups in poker-faced journal entries interspersed with black-and-white drawings of slouched figures bearing frowny expressions of dismay or annoyance to cue the laffs. Gramma, it eventually turns out, not only (unsurprisingly) has plans of her own, but is also keeping a shocking secret about those meatballs. To go with the knee-slapping set pieces, Kinney slips in a tasty bit of family lore about how Greg’s parents met, plus droll takes on such low-hanging comedy fruit as restaurant manners, viciously competitive board games, and social media influencers (Greg being one, albeit with zero followers, and his Aunt Veronica’s little dog being another, with 3.8 million).
An entertaining take on family values, Wimpy Kid style. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781419766954
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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