An amusing, delightful celebration of the transformative power of positive thinking and following your bliss.
Coping with his unwell mother, English boy Marty starts believing in dreams when he receives a special seed.
Before leaving when Marty was 4, his dad gave him a pocket-sized model of the Eiffel Tower. Since then, Marty has longed to visit Paris, but life with his mother, a compulsive, reclusive hoarder, causes him to repress his dreams. To escape the mountains of stuff at home, Marty visits his eccentric, optimistic grandfather at his garden plot. One day, Grandad gifts Marty a mysterious striped seed, promising him that seeds contain magic. While planting it, Marty feels an electric shock run through his hand and arm. The seed sprouts quickly and, thanks to Grandad’s special seaweed fertilizer, grows into what Grandad excitedly claims will be the world’s largest pumpkin—which he plans to scoop out, equip with an outboard motor, and use to travel to France. Marty begins to believe in Grandad’s enthusiastic, improbable plans as the magically massive pumpkin swells. Marty’s credibly realistic and daunting issues at home, school, and with his new friend, Gracie, contrast vividly with Grandad’s hilarious efforts to nurture the pumpkin and enable his grandson’s dreams. Their attention-getting, over-the-top adventures as they try to cross the English Channel in a pumpkin prove nail-biting and heartwarming. Gracie is deaf and aspires to be a dancer; she lip-reads and has a cochlear implant. Main characters default to White.
An amusing, delightful celebration of the transformative power of positive thinking and following your bliss. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-83202-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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