A sweet and nostalgic family tale with an appealing protagonist.
A 12-year-old tomboy experiences an unforgettable summer in this debut middle-grade novel.
Trouble finds Ruby Mae Ryan wherever she goes. With three brothers and a naturally scrappy disposition, she lets a young bobcat run wild in the house, believing it’s a sweet little kitten—a prank initiated by Ruby’s younger brother, Marty, that results in the girl’s punishment. It’s 1940, and shenanigans abound on the Ryan family farm in rural Oregon—a place that will soon have electricity thanks to Ruby’s father’s membership in a local co-op. Meanwhile, Ruby is spending the summer working on a project of her own: catching as many crawdads as possible and selling them to local restaurants and merchants in hopes of earning enough money for a surprise known only to a select few. And there are sleepovers with her best pal, Virginia Valentine, a New Orleans transplant and the daughter of a local restaurateur who has connections to a former United States president; close encounters with her ex–best friend, Mary Belle Baxter, who became a conceited bully after moving to town; and a possible crush on Paul Johnson, the new boy in school who’s just Ruby’s age. As the summer progresses, Ruby works harder and harder to catch and sell enough crawdads and locate the legendary but elusive Crawdad Haven, where the delicious seafood is plentiful. Will she reach her goal before summer’s end and electricity’s beginning? Like Ruby, Condon caught crawdads during his childhood in rural Oregon before spending almost three decades writing and editing for a magazine about electric cooperatives. His knowledge of the book’s specific environment, a character in and of itself, shows in the vivid descriptions of Ruby’s beloved home and a very illuminating afterword that includes more information on a few of the novel’s main topics. Ruby is the star of the engaging story: a hero relatable to young and older readers alike. She’s not afraid to stick up for what matters, whether that’s making lotion to soothe her mother’s red and mottled hands or dunking a local bully at the summer fun fair.
A sweet and nostalgic family tale with an appealing protagonist. (Afterword: 243-47)Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9852234-1-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Heart of Oak Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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