An uneven but ultimately heartwarming tale of a girl learning to find her place in the world.
In Nieber’s middle-grade novel, an adopted girl reluctantly visiting her birthplace in China learns to open up her heart to new experiences.
Twelve-year-old Lizzy, who was adopted as a baby, lives with her “heart mom” in Madison, Wisconsin. She and her mother prepare to travel to Lizzy’s home country of China on a post-adoption “bonding experience” trip to connect with her heritage and with other adoptees. The guide group they’re traveling with requires Lizzy to write a letter to her biological mother. They head to Beijing, with Lizzy still struggling to find kind words for the woman who abandoned her simply because Lizzy was a girl. But when she tours the rice paddies where many baby girls have been left to die solely due to their gender, Lizzy suddenly realizes how lucky she really is: “At my birth I was abandoned at the train station where I was sure to be found. Someone cared enough to call the police and they brought me to the Chenzhou orphanage. I wasn’t left to drown by my bio mother. I swear the first thing I’m going to do when we get to the hotel is rewrite my letter, thanking her for my life.” Lizzy tries to deliver her new letter to her old orphanage but discovers that it’s been torn down. With a newfound sense of belonging, Lizzy leaves her letter amid the rubble anyway and reflects on the friends that can be made with a truly open heart. Lizzy’s situation may be specific, but her feeling of never being able to fit in is universal enough to appeal to a wide middle-grade audience. Despite a few typos and occasional passages of stilted dialogue, the brisk plot manages to convey much sensitivity and compassion for Lizzy on her complicated emotional (and physical) journey. When Lizzy finally finds her voice, readers should be inspired to be themselves and to remember that it’s possible to make friends wherever they go.
An uneven but ultimately heartwarming tale of a girl learning to find her place in the world.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781639844272
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Pen It! Publications, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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