A frolicking adventure light on plot but delightfully interested in the importance of play.
An extrovert takes her homebody sister on a jampacked tour of the outside world in this illustrated children’s chapter book.
Polar opposites Sophie and Amelia live in “a giant treehouse near the woods,” apparently without adult supervision. Sophie stays almost completely indoors at all times, perusing books on an e-reader and “studying to become the perfect grown up.” Amelia likes to explore, dance, and make friends alongside her large-nosed dog, Columbus. On Amelia’s birthday, she asks Sophie to accompany her on an escapade, and her sister reluctantly agrees. They dance without music in a sunflower patch, climb a mountain, visit New York City, take a helicopter to an island, and are picked up by a friendly ex-pirate. Along the way, Amelia consistently pleads with Sophie to give each new activity a chance. Sophie grumblingly obliges while fretting all the while about inefficiency, the violation of social norms, and her transformation into a frivolous girl unprepared for adulthood. The sisters’ unrealistically packed day is stuffed with parables for lackluster children and feels a little preachy—can kids be made to embrace whimsy? But Vogdt’s celebration of rambunctiousness and curiosity is a nice counterweight to the pressures on youngsters to succeed only in quantitative terms. The most touching moment comes when Amelia tells Sophie to scream into the empty island air: “Just don’t tell me you never feel angry,” she says when her sister hesitates. Paz’s black-and-white illustrations pepper the text, enlivening the narrative with detailed pictures of Sophie’s increasing relaxation. Amelia has a slight Pippi Longstocking–ish charm, though her antics never veer into the mischievous or absurd. A dusting of intriguing magical happenings toward the end of the story adds a little verve and mystique. Both girls are White. A Black Lives Matter sign appears in Times Square behind them and they pass a climate justice protest, though the subject matter of both political images is not discussed in the text.
A frolicking adventure light on plot but delightfully interested in the importance of play. (Ages 5-8)Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-9895344901
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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
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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