An achingly authentic and relatable examination of adolescent friendship.
A 13-year-old navigates middle school’s constantly shifting social dynamics.
Everything is changing for STEM-loving Mia. Her best friend, Addy, has been pulling away, seemingly more concerned with elevating her social standing. When Mia hears that Tariq, her bestie from science camp, is moving to her town, she’s initially excited—until she sees that Tariq has shed his bespectacled boyish look and is now confoundingly cute and sporty. Mia is suddenly keenly aware that her family (fanboy father, coupon-clipping mother, and insect-loving little brother), who once seemed lovably quirky, now embarrass her. When a teacher announces the school’s Science Olympics, Mia and Tariq decide to team up with artsy Kinsey and disorganized Evan. But the group’s dynamics begin to erode: Could Tariq and Kinsey like each other? As the school’s first dance and the Science Olympics near, Mia must reconcile first crushes, friendship squabbles, and the daily ups and downs of the constantly changing landscape of middle school. Fantaskey’s endearing stand-alone graphic novel captures the gentle angst of this age with pitch-perfection, combining empathetic characters with gentle humor that’s reminiscent of the work of Kayla Miller and Raina Telgemeier. Vivid full-color illustrations in tidily arranged panels highlight facial expressions, emphasizing the characters’ emotions throughout. Mia’s dad has brown skin and straight black hair; her light-skinned mom is blond and blue-eyed, and there’s racial diversity in the supporting cast.
An achingly authentic and relatable examination of adolescent friendship. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780358395447
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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
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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