Natural disasters, aggressive wildlife, parental abandonment, responsibility for a baby, and looming poverty make life on a tropical island less enjoyable than one might imagine.
The siblings met in Look Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts (2016) are back, and this time they’re in search of a home, as they have outgrown the car they sleep in. Ranging in age from infant to 11, Penny, Toby, Pippa, Kimo, and Kim have “varying degrees of brown hair and brown skin” and are related via five different mothers and fathers, none of whom is reliable and all of whom have left the resourceful children soured on adults. An encounter with a mysterious stranger in a dark forest eventually leads to the discovery that one of the fathers is even more dastardly than they had realized, and it is up to the children to save the day—and their island home—from ecological destruction. The unnamed tropical island they inhabit seems modeled on Hawaii in its flora, geographical features, residents’ fondness for ham, and local speech (a pseudo-pidgin described dismissively), but it is a bland and characterless rendition of the original. With the exception of Smith’s delightful pen-and-ink illustrations, the book does not quite pull off its attempt at a wry and whimsical tone: the children’s lives seem more like drudgery than adventure, their personalities are two-dimensional, and the world they live in is neither fantastical enough to inspire delightful escape nor realistic enough to evoke deep immersion in the story.
A miss. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-29860-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Categories: CHILDREN'S ACTION & ADVENTURE FICTION
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