Satisfyingly over-the-top mayhem for all “low and slow” fans.
The Lowriders in Space saga continues with an even crazier ride than the first.
After an earthquake, Lupe the supermechanic impala, Elirio Malaria the mosquito, and El Chavo Flapjack the octopus realize that Genie the cat has gone missing. Trailing him in their galactic lowrider, they’re soon stymied by an amazing maíz maze of gigantic corn, where a punny, Gandalf-like coyote relates a fractured-mythological tale of how the Aztec god of the underworld uses the maze to trap victims forever. Undeterred, the friends plunge into a cave, where they’re surrounded by “metaphoric” rocks (“the building blocks of poets everywhere”). In the underworld, a gleefully bizarre and culturally dense adventure ensues. The friends meet the inconsolable, pre-Hispanic legend La Llorona, who believes Flappy is her lost child. Further in, they arrive at a macabre carnival midway where Day of the Dead references abound and the chupacabra drives a monster truck. When the gobsmacked compañeros finally find the caged (but still intact) Genie, they also come face to face with their nemesis, lucha libre fanatic and god of the underworld Mictlantecuhtli (“Mic to you, ¡idiotas!”). Lupe must wrestle him for her cat’s freedom, but Genie has a surprise for everyone. Raúl the Third’s ultradetailed crosshatched artwork more than meets the demands of this cast-of-thousands comic opus. The copious Spanish vocabulary is defined in footnotes and again in a glossary in the backmatter.
Satisfyingly over-the-top mayhem for all “low and slow” fans. (Graphic fantasy. 8-13)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2343-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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