An old-fashioned summer adventure set in a very modern world, this lively family tale will leave readers impatient for more.
Even on historic Rock Island, “Where Time Stands Still,” things change.
When the four Fletcher boys and their two fathers arrive at their traditional August vacation cottage on a New England coastal island, they discover their beloved lighthouse next door fenced off and new Latino neighbors, the Galindos, who have two daughters, teenage Val and her younger sister, Alex. The cheerful disorder of a large family takes center stage in this companion to The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher (2014). Issues of adoption and same-sex parents recede into near invisibility as the boys face other challenges. The energetic third-person narrative makes use of alternating points of view to chronicle each boy's personal story. Blond, white Sam, 13, finds friends in the local theater and discovers Shakespeare; African-American Jax, now 11, pals around with Alex and experiences real bigotry for the first time; his white near-twin Eli has his 11th birthday and conquers his fear of kayaking; and 6-year-old Indian-American Frog struggles to teach their two cats to swim. Together with the Galindo girls, the four boys solve the mystery of the closed lighthouse and its unpleasant buyer-to-be. There is constant action and delightful humor, but there are also realistic present-day problems and happy solutions.
An old-fashioned summer adventure set in a very modern world, this lively family tale will leave readers impatient for more. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-52130-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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