Jarrett’s frank view of the inner-city perils he faces is optimistically balanced by the strengths offered by family,...
Booth offers a glimpse of gritty inner-city life for a middle-grade audience through the eyes of 11-year-old Jarrett.
Jarrett’s failing summer school, making an ignominious repetition of sixth grade seem all too likely. His mother, fine at nurturing a long series of foster babies, is surprisingly oblivious to his floundering attempts to manage the schoolwork and his resulting discouragement, an emotional distance she also maintains with strong male role model Terrence, her boyfriend. Then she takes in Kevon, mature beyond his 12 years, and his toddler sister, Treasure. Jarrett resentfully shares his room and life with Kevon, but he also spies on him, discovering much about his foster brother’s mysterious, unhappy past. At the same time, he and best friend Ennis are cleverly crafting a horror film trailer at the community center that plays a major, positive role in local kids’ lives. Ennis is exploring his growing realization that “I don’t like girls, and I don’t think I ever will,” a revelation Jarrett sensitively accepts, in sharp, not fully explained contrast to his increasingly bitter, self-indulgent conflict with Kevon. The many plotlines keep the narrative brisk, enhanced by believable dialogue and nicely rounded characters, even though their motivations don’t always feel fully justified.
Jarrett’s frank view of the inner-city perils he faces is optimistically balanced by the strengths offered by family, friends and his community. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-545-22496-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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