A deep look at complex dynamics among family and friends.
When her mother ends up in a medically induced coma following a car accident, 11-year-old Addy faces many challenges.
Apart from worrying about her mom, Addy isn’t sure how to feel about having her 24-year-old half brother, Julian, coming to care for her. Julian grew up with his dad, and Addy last saw him years ago. Whenever she asked about him, Mom answered vaguely, saying it was “complicated.” As if she weren’t dealing with enough change, Addy, who’s cued Black, feels stuck between her two best friends, Thea and Luz, who are recently estranged—can she get them to spend time together and heal from their fight? When Mom slowly begins to show signs of improvement, Addy, who fears it will mean the end of her time with Julian and wishes they could be united, becomes determined to figure out what happened to break up their family. She finds her mom’s old journal and it leads to a discovery that upends her world. The story moves quickly, and Marks digs into the ups and downs of relationships with sensitivity as Addy wrestles with her conflicting emotions while trying to get her best friends back together and to repair the relationship between Mom and Julian. The story also thoughtfully explores the importance of caring for your mental health and taking accountability for your actions; Addy is well-intentioned but needs to reflect on her attempts to change others’ feelings.
A deep look at complex dynamics among family and friends. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780063427686
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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