Wild worldbuilding and the colorful cast will delight.
Stepsiblings run into world-hopping, magical trouble in this series opener from How To Train Your Dragon author Cowell.
After an in medias res opening teasing dangers about an alien world, the narration flashes back to where it began for two sets of siblings in a blended family. K2 and Izzabird O’Hero only agree with Theo and Mabel Smith, their stepsiblings, on two things—their love for shared half sibling, baby Annipeck and their wish to unblend their blended family. Theo’s convinced the O’Heros are witches; Izzabird wishes her relatives would hurry up and teach her their secret Magic. But secrecy is thrown out the window by the arrival of an Otherworlder in the family washing machine—bounty hunter Horizabel Delft. There’s also a robot assassin and a dastardly pirate. They’re searching for a child with the gift of making Alternative Atlases that show passages between worlds. The child in question? The least stereotypically heroic O’Hero, cautious bully-magnet K2, who has dyslexia and amblyopia. To protect their family, the kids end up venturing to a human-hating world where they must make amends for the O’Heros’ mixed legacies and learn what it means to be a family. Cowell throws all sorts of fantastical obstacles in the kids’ ways, using action to add tension to the humorous narration that is enhanced by her frequent illustrations. The Smiths are depicted with dark skin and curly hair, and the O’Hero children are pale and freckled.
Wild worldbuilding and the colorful cast will delight. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780316536394
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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