A bittersweet story of silent perseverance and kids working for themselves.
When her telecommunications professional father is laid off, Joy’s family’s relocation across town threatens to cost her more than money can buy.
Twelve-year-old Joy Taylor wants to compose music for films, but now that money is tight, her piano lessons, along with so much else, are sacrificed. They have moved from a house to apartment 3C, a small two-bedroom where she and her younger sister must share a bunk bed and the walls are so thin, her parents’ fighting keeps them up at night. Then Joy meets Nora from 5B, who lost her mother to cancer. The two girls share a love of movies, complicated home lives, and an obvious need to just get away sometimes. A cornerstone of the friendships between Joy and other kids in the building is the secret, cramped Hideout accessed through a storage closet near the laundry room. According to the literal writing on the wall, it’s been a sanctuary for generations of kids needing a space to retreat. Marks makes the necessity of this intimate space for not-quite-little-but-not-yet-big kids simultaneously plausible and disheartening. As the story progresses through various relationship trials, it’s not the tween drama that provides the most emotional resonance; rather, seeing children work so hard to make their own place in the world, forge connections, and pursue their own interests is truly inspiring—but their needing to do so in quiet corners while adults remain oblivious is terribly sobering. Joy and her family are Black; Nora is cued as Latinx.
A bittersweet story of silent perseverance and kids working for themselves. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-287587-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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