Charming, highly original, and sure to secure its own place in the graphic canon.
Twins discover a whole new world at the New York Public Library.
Page and Turner Reed are library-loving Manhattanites with jet-setting parents and an absentee nanny. On a whim, they decide to take their father’s beloved first edition of Dracula to the main branch of the NYPL in hopes of learning its value. After they lose the precious volume, they seek help from the enigmatic Night Librarian, Ms. Literati. During their ensuing adventure, the twins learn that “magic builds in books.” The Night Librarian helps vent the tomes in order to prevent “a catastrophic KABLOOEY.” However, it seems that despite Ms. Literati’s best efforts, characters are escaping, perhaps with their own sinister motives. Both a love letter to libraries and to literature, Lincoln’s absolutely delightful graphic tale incorporates influences from many recognizable literary works: Nana, the dog from Peter Pan, helps Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island and Alice (of Wonderland fame) track down baddies from Poe, Stevenson, and more. Book lovers will be inspired by the dazzling number of classic and contemporary books that are name-dropped and will certainly prowl their local libraries seeking checkouts and investigating whether Night Librarians are indeed real. The fluid artwork features scribbly lines, interestingly laid-out panels, and creative use of a strikingly unusual color palette. Page and Turner read white; Ms. Literati presents Black.
Charming, highly original, and sure to secure its own place in the graphic canon. (Graphic adventure. 8-13)Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593617656
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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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