A well-told story celebrating the power of friendship to comfort and heal when families fall short.
Secrets and family upheaval test Katie and Ana’s newly minted friendship.
Adventurous Ana makes fifth grade fun, although Katie still misses the mountains and her friends back in Utah. She’s grateful for the new heart she received after her adoption from a Russian orphanage and for her loving parents, but lately she’s been wondering about her birthparents and life before adoption. Chafing at her mother’s overprotectiveness, Katie admires Ana’s fearlessness, unaware it’s prompted by desperation. Ana’s Jewish family has been torn apart since her father, who played hockey for the Boston Bruins, abruptly left them. Ana’s dropped hockey; her little brother, Mikey, is bullied by a gang of her classmates; their mother’s depressed. Soon their dad’s Russian-immigrant mother, Babushka, arrives to take charge. Ana resents her imperious ways and weird meals, so when Katie bonds with Babushka, friction develops between the girls. Ana envies the attention Katie’s loving, white Christian parents lavish on her; Katie longs for a Babushka to explain and share her Russian heritage. As misunderstandings mount, the white girls’ friendship threatens to unravel. The complicated realities of adoption—for example, that Katie’s intact adoptive family resembles Ana’s fractured one in ways an intact biological family does not—are portrayed with insight rare in children’s fiction. The also-rare depiction of a Russian-born adoptee (one of more than 46,000 in the U.S.) is especially welcome.
A well-told story celebrating the power of friendship to comfort and heal when families fall short. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-241434-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
Telgemeier’s bold colors, superior visual storytelling, and unusual subject matter will keep readers emotionally engaged and...
Catrina narrates the story of her mixed-race (Latino/white) family’s move from Southern California to Bahía de la Luna on the Northern California coast.
Dad has a new job, but it’s little sister Maya’s lungs that motivate the move: she has had cystic fibrosis since birth—a degenerative breathing condition. Despite her health, Maya loves adventure, even if her lungs suffer for it and even when Cat must follow to keep her safe. When Carlos, a tall, brown, and handsome teen Ghost Tour guide introduces the sisters to the Bahía ghosts—most of whom were Spanish-speaking Mexicans when alive—they fascinate Maya and she them, but the terrified Cat wants only to get herself and Maya back to safety. When the ghost adventure leads to Maya’s hospitalization, Cat blames both herself and Carlos, which makes seeing him at school difficult. As Cat awakens to the meaning of Halloween and Day of the Dead in this strange new home, she comes to understand the importance of the ghosts both to herself and to Maya. Telgemeier neatly balances enough issues that a lesser artist would split them into separate stories and delivers as much delight textually as visually. The backmatter includes snippets from Telgemeier’s sketchbook and a photo of her in Día makeup.
Telgemeier’s bold colors, superior visual storytelling, and unusual subject matter will keep readers emotionally engaged and unable to put down this compelling tale. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-54061-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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