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THE LUMINOUS LIFE OF LUCY LANDRY

A heartwarming tale of belonging and learning that life’s treasures aren’t always shiny.

Lucy, a French and Ojibwe orphan living in Michigan in 1912, struggles to fit in with her new foster family.

Living with the Martins, an Ojibwe family who are lighthouse keepers on an island in Lake Superior, isn’t ideal for someone who’s “allergic to lake water.” Eleven-year-old Lucy long ago lost her mother to illness. When she was 9, her frequently absent sailor father died in a shipwreck. After her caretaker, Miss Mamie, passes away, Lucy experiences even more upheaval. She’s haunted by her father’s death—the origin of her fear of water—but she cherishes his stories of the 1866 wreck of the Elva Jane near her new home. The six Martin children have little tolerance for imaginative Lucy’s fabricated stories, and from her loneliness grows a need to reconnect with Papa, motivating her to seek the ruby necklace that went down with the Elva Jane. This quest gives her a purpose but endangers the Martin kids and threatens Mr. Martin’s job. In a climactic moment, Lucy must draw strength from Papa’s memory and face down her fears. This charming page-turner centers a courageous young person whose journey is also a powerful testament to the importance of placing Indigenous children in homes that reflect their cultures. Despite the bumpy start, Lucy finds comfort in connecting with her Ojibwe heritage and also begins to learn some Anishinaabemowin words from the Martins.

A heartwarming tale of belonging and learning that life’s treasures aren’t always shiny. (map, author’s note, glossary) (Historical fiction. 8-12)

Pub Date: March 5, 2024

ISBN: 9780823453634

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Holiday House

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

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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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HOT MESS

From the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series , Vol. 19

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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