The friendship dynamics are easy to follow; fans will be pleased.
In this latest series entry, the new student at Sweet Valley Middle School makes a bad first impression.
Twins Jessica and Elizabeth create their own new girl, fictional triplet sister Jennifer, after Brooke, their unpleasant new neighbor from Los Angeles, holds them in contempt. Brooke, with her chic, excessively formal clothes, gives off a snooty vibe, turning up her nose at anything local, disparaging Jessica and calling her Unicorns club “Uni-duds,” and insulting the school paper Liz is proud to work on. When Brooke accidently spills paint on Jessica’s book fair poster, classmates attribute the mishap to malice, and her fate as a pariah is sealed. The sisters take turns posing as Jennifer, whose friendly overtures soften Brooke up. She even confides in Jennifer that she’s hurt by her workaholic father’s neglect and her mother’s abandonment. Jessica plots to give Brooke a public comeuppance, while Liz, as usual, shows more sensitivity, integrity, and compassion than her twin, but loyalty leads her to participate in the scheme, performing the role of Jennifer. Disaster, remorse, and the requisite apologies from the blue-eyed, strawberry blond twins follow—and there’s even a promise of brighter days ahead for Brooke at home. The lively artwork, which uses bright pastels for most of the story, switches to darker jewel tones during scenes of emotional distress. Brooke has light brown skin and dark brown hair, and a Black-presenting supporting character is nonbinary.
The friendship dynamics are easy to follow; fans will be pleased. (cast of characters) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593807255
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House Graphic
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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