This auspicious series opener will leave readers eager for the next case.
An aspiring sleuth from London endeavors to uncover the truth behind her ancestor’s death.
Twelve-and-three-quarters-year-old Mizzy sees herself as “Mizzy the Marvellous, world-famous detective.” Unfortunately, it feels like everyone else sees her as a baby. Her parents are so protective that “you’d think people with Down syndrome aren’t capable of anything,” and they dismiss Mizzy’s sleuthing by comparing her to her Great Aunt Jane, who was dubbed by some an “interfering sticky-beak” for observing and writing stories about the neighbors (to others, she was “a brilliantly perceptive surveiller”). When Mizzy discovers Great Aunt Jane’s diaries while staying with her cousins for the summer holidays, everything changes. Apparently Great Aunt Jane was murdered—and revealing her killer at Grandma Mabel’s 80th birthday party would show everyone that Mizzy definitely isn’t a baby. But as Mizzy interviews the quirky members of her extended family and pores over her phonetically spelled notes (with suspects humorously caricatured in Magoogan’s cartoonlike illustrations), she realizes that deducing whodunit could be more difficult—and more dangerous—than she thought. Though some relatives feel underdeveloped, readers will root for Mizzy as she uncovers family secrets and pieces together a surprisingly complex case. Mizzy—whom debut author Hatcher-Smith, a speech-language pathologist, modeled on kids she’s worked with—is appealingly multifaceted. Her desire to be taken seriously will resonate, and her growth is poignant and satisfying. Most characters read white.
This auspicious series opener will leave readers eager for the next case. (family tree, author’s note) (Mystery. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781774885116
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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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