A well-crafted, entertaining call for middle schoolers to find their voices and remain accountable in shaping their own...
Preteens Charlotte Lockard and Ben Boxer enjoy an ongoing online Scrabble feud, each vying for word-game domination, while they both silently struggle with middle school social catastrophes and crumbling family infrastructures.
Suddenly, their intermittent Scrabble banter becomes an unexpected lifeline. Pennsylvanian Charlotte’s rock collections, incessant anagramming, and deep-delving thought spirals charm readers instantly; Louisianan Ben’s sputtering, encyclopedic knowledge of presidential history, Ravenclaw blanket, relentless recycling statistics, and stick-to-it optimism couldn’t be sweeter. Guileless and earnest, these two kids seem poised for inevitable heartbreak. Charlotte can’t face her lifelong best friend, who suddenly thinks she’s a “parasite,” or her father, who’s recovering in the ICU after a heart attack. Ben can’t understand his parents’ marriage’s “devolution” into a divorce or the ridicule his student council campaign incites. Catastrophe looms and builds through the book, the reckoning of a single week that culminates with a crucial convergence of the Scrabble friends’ virtual world with their real one. Charlotte’s and Ben’s alternating first-person accounts of their humiliations and struggles induce a constricting tightness in readers’ chests. Their unspoken feelings and worries (which appear in quavering italics) weigh heavily. Readers will undoubtedly see themselves in these pages. Charlotte and Ben are both depicted with pale skin and dark hair on the cover; their respective ethnicities go unmentioned, and their supporting cast is a diverse one.
A well-crafted, entertaining call for middle schoolers to find their voices and remain accountable in shaping their own social spheres. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-241418-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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