A rebooted, briskly paced holiday parable that focuses on generosity and community connection.
A curmudgeonly woman discovers the true meaning of Thanksgiving while caring for a friendly feline in Boatwright’s debut illustrated children’s book.
Estranged from her adult daughter and on barely amicable terms with her employees, Mrs. Potts is a grim workaholic who reacts with fright when she encounters unhoused people sleeping on the street in San Francisco.When she sees a stray tuxedo cat making a racket on a nearby roof, however, her rigid resistance to change wavers, and she takes the animal in. Once indoors, the cat quickly wins her over. Now that she has a companion, Mrs. Potts reflects on her relative solitude and impulsively cooks up a Thanksgiving feast. Meanwhile, her daughter, whom Potts has shunned because of her musician husband, gets back in contact to invite her to New York City.There are no Christmas Carol–style ghosts in this story, but stabs of conscience do materialize in Mrs. Potts’ dreams, in which she finds herself without a place to live and unrecognized by her daughter. Moved for the first time to share things with others, she brings plates to houseless neighbors and then to her employee Clara Thigg, whose sick child, Abby, evokes Charles Dickens’ Tiny Tim. Waldron’s grayscale watercolor illustrations of the story’s people and things feature loose, energetic pen-and-ink lines and enliven the story admirably. The text’s manageable length makes for a quick read-aloud. Crotchety Mrs. Potts is an unusual protagonist in a book for young children, but her presence may encourage adults to think about how kids witness cruelty or apathy regarding human suffering. Potts’ Scrooge-like behavior toward others is updated for a more modern era (“she gave to the poor through United Way”), although Boatwright’s tale remains somewhat didactic. Still, its focus on class disparities, houselessness, and conscience makes it multidimensional.
A rebooted, briskly paced holiday parable that focuses on generosity and community connection.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986434407
Page Count: -
Publisher: Firefly Ink Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious.
If you made a recording to be heard by the aliens who found the iPod, what would you record?
For 11-year-old Alex Petroski, it's easy. He records everything. He records the story of how he travels to New Mexico to a rocket festival with his dog, Carl Sagan, and his rocket. He records finding out that a man with the same name and birthday as his dead father has an address in Las Vegas. He records eating at Johnny Rockets for the first time with his new friends, who are giving him a ride to find his dead father (who might not be dead!), and losing Carl Sagan in the wilds of Las Vegas, and discovering he has a half sister. He even records his own awful accident. Cheng delivers a sweet, soulful debut novel with a brilliant, refreshing structure. His characters manage to come alive through the “transcript” of Alex’s iPod recording, an odd medium that sounds like it would be confusing but really works. Taking inspiration from the Voyager Golden Record released to space in 1977, Alex, who explains he has “light brown skin,” records all the important moments of a journey that takes him from a family of two to a family of plenty.
Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18637-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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