A meaningful, summery slice-of-life story.
Verity “Very” Nelson is back in this stand-alone follow-up to Very Bad at Math (2025).
Grandma Deb’s memory issues are worsening, so Very and her mother drive from Asheville, North Carolina, to Limestone, Wisconsin, to pack up her house and move her into assisted living. Very trades her summer plans—a civic engagement workshop, lake house trip, and time with her two best friends—for weeks in a financially struggling town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. At least she gets time with her aunt and cousins Reagan and Maya. Limestone’s beloved public pool, a New Deal project, is closed due to needing expensive repairs, and intrepid Very sets out to rally the community to save it. She also deals with Cranky Iris, her grandmother’s unpleasant roommate. Very’s strong friendships with other girls form a highlight of her adventures. She reconnects with sensitive, animal-loving Maya and befriends the mayor’s daughter, Piper, who invites her to the pool at the country club. Larson portrays the messier complications of Very’s life with honest realism: Mom struggles with Grandma Deb’s decline and the sale of her childhood home, and there’s a complicated friction between Piper and Maya, which Very hopes to repair. White-presenting Very, who’s surrounded by a racially diverse supporting cast, also develops insights into her own tendency to boldly rush in and try to change things, sometimes without understanding important context. The immersive setting and charming character designs will delight readers.
A meaningful, summery slice-of-life story. (author’s note) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9780063311329
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperAlley
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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