Quietly compelling.
After her parents separate, a Pennsylvania preteen struggles to accept the new normal.
Liberty, 12, loves creating star maps and connecting stars in new patterns, forming new constellations (rendered by Goffi). After their dad moves out, she and her anxious little sister, Jilly, 9, don’t see him for months. Their mother avoids answering questions. Lib abandons her star maps; the promise and possibilities they represented no longer feel real. Peer relationships suffer, too. Former friend Leah “excommunicates” her. Finn, offspring of another rocky marriage, ignores her. Being shunned isn’t all bad; Lib enjoys eating lunch with a fellow outcast, Iranian American Malik (other characters default to white). Reconnecting with Dad, the girls are upset to learn he’s dating. Desperate to restore her family, Lib bargains with the stars and meteorite she lugged home, utilizing magical thinking to bring about Dad’s return. Counseling helps, too. Lib may not be clinically depressed like Dad, but what ails her is equally huge. “We co-own a divorce. Split four ways,” she tells him. “It’s ours.” Lib’s precise, present-tense narration sensitively reveals how divorce changes each family member, not just their relationships. It’s a painful truth, but for Lib, sharing that hard-won insight is also empowering. Acclaimed as a YA novelist (Dig, 2019, etc.), King pens a middle-grade book that will especially resonate with readers confronting or affected by family turmoil.
Quietly compelling. (author’s note, resources) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-23636-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Levine/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
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
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