by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 2021
Pitched for chortles, not chills.
Fourteen original tales featuring ghosts, mummies, and other staples of beneath-the-bedsheets terror.
Actually, the scariest thing here is the cautionary preface, which warns away the easily frightened with enticing promises of “skeletons and zombies and human heads.” The stories deliver all of these and more, but invariably in a vein more comical than chilling—Anders, a disembodied head, matches up in school with Gunther, a headless body, to go after attractive classmate Prudence; an airport scanner turns everyone into skeletons (fun for a while, if boring at Halloween); a town survives the zombie apocalypse by creating “brains” made of tofu. In other highlights, two mummies duke it out in court after one trademarks “The Mummy” as a brand, and to win a science fair, young Victor literally makes a friend after visiting the cemetery behind his house. Rowley, credulous as ever, relates in the “100 percent TRUE” capper how his friend Greg Heffley became possessed by a demon after watching a horror movie on a sleepover and was only restored to himself by an application of toilet (in lieu of holy) water. Along with droll twists aplenty (Prudence ultimately goes off with Anders, leaving Gunther to grow up and become the Headless Horseman), Kinney tucks in one or more outline drawings on every page featuring racially indeterminate but White-presenting figures expressing, usually, exaggerated joy or dismay.
Pitched for chortles, not chills. (Short stories. 8-12)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5697-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
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SEEN & HEARD
by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019
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
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by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney
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SEEN & HEARD
by Kate DiCamillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
Tenderly resonant and memorable.
Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.
Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century small-town setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.
Tenderly resonant and memorable. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231052
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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