Contains an abundance of well-worn tropes alongside regressive stereotypes presented as humor.
A sixth grader records his peeves and pranks at home and in school.
Charlie resolutely insists that he’s keeping a “notebook,” not a “diary,” because “only girls do that,” and anyway, he adds, “at least the stories I write are interesting. Nothing to do with what girls write.” He rejoices in harassing his teenage half sister, despite being inevitably caught and confined to his room by his “witch” of a mom, regards his younger twin siblings as “leeches,” shrugs off schoolwork, laughs when a schoolmate is fat-shamed, and nurses a crush on new classmate Justine. Readers are likely to scoff when Charlie suddenly turns out to have been a good kid all along, befriending the bullied classmate (whom he attempts to compliment in a problematic aside, “The more I look at him, the less I think he’s fat”), buckling down to improve his grades, and treating the twins more kindly. Casual misogyny and fatphobia pervade the story: “My dad’s the coolest (especially when mom’s not around)” and “today, FAT BOY (we call him that sometimes) needed his inhaler.” The cast largely presents white; one child with an Asian name is, stereotypically, “the BRAIN of the class,” and a friend’s nanny “from somewhere in Asia” doesn’t speak English, so “we can say ANYTHING we want…” Several blank ruled pages at the end offer room for diarists (or even boys) to fill in with personal grievances.
Contains an abundance of well-worn tropes alongside regressive stereotypes presented as humor. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9782925004042
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Forbidden Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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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