A poignant, insightful story of family crisis and the healing power of friendship.
A little girl’s world disintegrates after her mother’s illness and severe depression result in family tragedy.
Nicknamed “Chirp” because she loves bird-watching in her native Cape Cod, 11-year-old Naomi’s devoted to her free-spirited mother, who’s always been a dancer. Unfortunately, her mother’s inability to cope with a multiple sclerosis diagnosis leads to her hospitalization for depression. Ironically, Chirp’s hyperanalytical psychiatrist father seems clueless about what’s happening emotionally to his family, while her older sister blames him for sending her mother away. Meanwhile, Chirp quietly withdraws, finding comfort in her birds and the unlikely companionship of her neighbor and classmate, Joey, whose own family has “significant issues.” When her mother returns and commits suicide, Chirp’s shocked, bereft and in deep denial, until Joey helps her find her way. Chirp’s first-person account of how she and her family react to the events leading to her mother’s funeral presents a nuanced chronicle of loss. Ehrlich’s ability to get inside Chirp’s head, to create beautifully rounded characters and to flesh out details of life for this Jewish family in 1972 Cape Cod adds to the overall realism. Frequent textual references to wild birds and relevant children’s books provide interesting depth.
A poignant, insightful story of family crisis and the healing power of friendship. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-38607-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
An entertaining take on family values, Wimpy Kid style.
A summer vacation turns out to be anything but relaxing for Greg and a teeming horde of Heffleys.
Gramma declines the offer of a grand birthday celebration, saying that “what would make her REALLY happy is if everyone else went to Ruttyneck Island”—though she prepares individual packs of her legendary meatballs. (“You knew exactly how much Gramma likes you by how many meatballs you got.”) A gaggle of Heffley relatives and a dog stuff themselves into a small beach house, where overcrowding, personality conflicts, and simmering resentments become just some of the ingredients in a rolling boil of sitcom-style catastrophes, not to mention questionable decisions ranging from leaving the kids to make dinner unsupervised to labeling a cooler “HUMAN ORGANS” to keep random passersby from helping themselves. As usual, Greg supplies the setups in poker-faced journal entries interspersed with black-and-white drawings of slouched figures bearing frowny expressions of dismay or annoyance to cue the laffs. Gramma, it eventually turns out, not only (unsurprisingly) has plans of her own, but is also keeping a shocking secret about those meatballs. To go with the knee-slapping set pieces, Kinney slips in a tasty bit of family lore about how Greg’s parents met, plus droll takes on such low-hanging comedy fruit as restaurant manners, viciously competitive board games, and social media influencers (Greg being one, albeit with zero followers, and his Aunt Veronica’s little dog being another, with 3.8 million).
An entertaining take on family values, Wimpy Kid style. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781419766954
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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