A heartfelt story for young readers that tackles the highs and lows of loving someone with a serious illness.
In Mahler’s middle-grade novel, a young boy starts a secret project to give his sister hope after her cancer diagnosis.
When his older sister, Laura, gets the news that she has leukemia, 11-year-old James doesn’t know what to do. Before Laura’s diagnosis, his biggest problem had been his school bully and archenemy, Dylan McDonald. But now, his 14-year-old, basketball-playing sister has cancer and has to start chemotherapy, and it’s a brutal adjustment for the whole family. His parents take turns staying at the hospital with Laura, who gets sick from the chemo, and when everyone is home together, they don’t interact much. When James expresses all of this to Mr. Clemens, the school custodian, he receives some life-changing wisdom: “Remember this, James: in the battle between night and day, the sunrise is undefeated.” Determined to give his sister a sunrise of her own to keep her hopes up, James starts Project Laura, a secret plan to take his family and his best friend, Luke (who’s helping with the project), to the Final Four basketball tournament coming to Fort Worth. It turns out that raising $3,000 for tickets isn’t easy for an elementary school student, and he’ll need all the help he can get—even if it comes from unexpected places. Mahler’s novel tells a touching story that doesn’t skirt around the harsh reality of how cancer affects everyone involved. James is a compelling lead character; his tender love for his sister and his desire to bring his family back together make him sympathetic. The passage of time can occasionally be confusing, as a few temporal jumps throughout the story can feel a bit jarring. Still, a lively cast of characters helps James along the way, and a fun twist ties everyone together at the end.
A heartfelt story for young readers that tackles the highs and lows of loving someone with a serious illness.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798896371731
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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