A gentle, hilarious outdoor affair.
Abbie Wu’s middle school misadventures head out to the wilderness in this third installment.
Just when middle school had begun to feel like “a gigantic hamster wheel that never stopped spinning,” the sixth grade Pointdexter Middle School routine is interrupted with news of the longest field trip yet: Outdoor School. What awaits at a weeklong camp trip where “legends are born,” “legacies are built,” and “anything can happen”? A lot. While her classmates take to the change in scenery, Abbie’s excitement lasts for all of 11 minutes and 27 seconds. Abbie’s friends Jess, Logan, and Maxine all have “REALLY different ideas of how to use their time,” and her cabinmates don’t seem particularly interested in getting to know her. To top it off, there’s the annual “epic clash of campers vs. counselors”—high school students who include Abbie’s always put-together brother, Peter. And so Abbie 2.0 is born, and she’s going to do “things that [she] never thought [she] would (or could).” Though the story’s resolutions are neat, readers will find comfort in Abbie’s humorous and resilient approach to social and personal uncertainties. Vivat’s energetic drawings and expressive lettering capture Abbie’s charm, anxiety, and pluck, livening the familiar beats and scenarios of a camp story. A diverse supporting cast rallies with Chinese American Abbie, and particularly nice are the heart-to-hearts with teen figures.
A gentle, hilarious outdoor affair. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-239883-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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