A flashy tale with a clear political agenda.
Four tweens travel through time to preserve key moments in American history.
In 1961, the History Twister attempts to reroute Freedom 7’s angle of entry and thwart the American space program at Cape Canaveral. The History Club says “Eat globe!” to that, disconnecting the villain’s device just in time. Rewind to the club’s origins at a middle school history competition, when time first stops for classmates Cam, Zack, Becca, and Thomas. The mysterious Adviser appears and gives the team a dire directive: An immense evil is waging war against the past that only the History Club can thwart. The main showdown in this series opener takes the History Club to 1804’s famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. But can they stop another of the History Twister’s “crimes against history” before it’s too late? Sianipar’s full-color art and engaging, varied paneling keep the plot moving. While many characters appear white, Zack is Black, the History Twister is tan-skinned, and a last name cues Cam as Latine. This first children’s book from Fox News host Baier brings history to life—and aligns it with the Adviser’s “one rule” that “once what can happen has happened, it must remain so for all time.” While the overarching story will appeal to kids, it mostly serves to further the didactic premise, which adults will recognize as a transparent attempt to justify a monolithic version of U.S. history.
A flashy tale with a clear political agenda. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781534485594
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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