A finely crafted exploration of grief that children and adults should experience together.
A boy learns lessons about growing up after his grandfather dies in Murray’s middle-grade graphic novel.
Eight-year-old Dylan Ranger is best friends with his grandfather. The boy’s mom, Eileen, a single parent, struggles to keep the family afloat. While she works as a real estate agent, Granddad and Dylan go on adventures as Red Rocket and Kid Cosmo, their favorite comic book characters. When the pair collide with a car while riding in a shopping cart, Eileen tries to convince her father that it’s time to live in a care home. Granddad wants to see Wise Oaks for himself, so he drives there for a surprise visit. Sadly, he becomes confused on the road, hits a tree, and doesn’t survive. When Eileen later tells Dylan that Granddad has gone to a “better place,” he assumes she means Wise Oaks. She tries to bond with her son in her father’s absence but remains distracted by work. Dylan decides to find Granddad himself, but when he gets to Wise Oaks, he isn’t there. Dylan instead meets an older man named Lloyd who is willing to go on an adventure. As they travel Wise Oaks’ grounds by golf cart, they approach another grassy property—and the truth about where Granddad has gone. Writer Murray and artist Daley offer a moving middle-grade tale that helps children cope with the loss of a loved one. Despite his mental fogginess, Granddad is a positive influence on Dylan, keeping him away from screens all day and using a swear jar. Granddad’s fate isn’t shown explicitly on page, and the scariest moment may be an argument between Eileen and Dylan in which she says her husband left because he “didn’t want to take care of you!” Daley’s deft illustrations are in ink-washed grayscale until comic book adventures call for color. Key scenes are single-panel pages and convey emotion beautifully (for example, when Eileen visits the crash site). Artists like Jeff Lemire occasionally lend their talents, and homages pop up, including one for The Death of Superman.
A finely crafted exploration of grief that children and adults should experience together.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60309-495-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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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