This Christian-centered story deftly limns the conflicting emotions of kids who have experienced loss.
A young girl grieving her mother’s death discovers the healing power of family, friends, and God in Templeton’s middle-grade novel.
Mira is 10 years old when she loses her mom to cancer. At first, she remains in staunch denial that her mother would ever leave her, even believing that the entire funeral is fake. She doesn’t really start to accept her loss until she meets up with her mother’s best friend, Sylvia. Mira navigates various bumps throughout the grieving process—including her friends pulling away, a new life in her father and stepmother’s house, and panic attacks at school. She also wrestles with immense guilt over a fight she had with her mother before she died. Mira eventually begins to find solace in her church’s grief support group and starts to keep her tears in a jar as proof of her love and grief: “I move the jar to catch the tears from the other eye. I think of Mom’s face. Before long, I’ve made a ring of tears at the bottom of my jar. It’s a little silly, but maybe there’s something to it. I screw the lid onto my jar. I can’t believe it’s come to this.” Sylvia encourages Mira to continue making art that, along with her faith in God, helps her eventually move forward while honoring the memory of her mother. Based on the author’s own experiences, the novel skillfully and sensitively tackles the wildly swinging emotions that can come with deep grief. While parts of Mara’s narrative voice come across as oddly old-fashioned for a girl her age (“I hear her blaspheme, which Mom taught me is swearing, using Jesus’ name”), the dialogue is largely natural and age-appropriate. Steeped in Christianity, Templeton’s story is likely to provide deep comfort to those who observe the faith and would prove an excellent resource for Christian youth groups.
This Christian-centered story deftly limns the conflicting emotions of kids who have experienced loss.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781738881802
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
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
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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