A sweet middle-grade novel about the power of art.
A 13-year-old girl discovers a new passion after a terrible car accident in the first book in the Sourland Mountain series for preteens.
Catalynd “Cat” Hamilton is facing big changes. Her beloved older brother, Buddy, is heading off to college in Florida, far from their home on Sourland Mountain near Princeton, New Jersey, and in order to pay for his education, her parents have rented the barn that was her go-to spot for play and thinking. One day in late summer, an errand run is complicated by a thunderstorm, and the car containing Cat and her mother hits a tree. Now wheelchair-bound for several weeks, Cat finds her life altered as her mother morphs from sunny and productive to barely being able to get out of bed. Curiosity and a school project lead Cat to a friendship with her family’s tenant, Benton Whitman. An artist named for Thomas Hart Benton, Cat’s new pal and mentor helps her with a project on Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, which depicts a young woman who “had lost almost all of her ability to walk.” As Cat adjusts to using a wheelchair and to missing her brother, she discovers a new love for drawing and painting and a way to channel this passion into her everyday life. Meanwhile, Cat learns to connect with the people around her, particularly her mother, who is feeling her own effects from the fateful car crash. McGlothlin, the author of Andy’s Snowball Story (2010), has degrees in art history and English, and her knowledge of both storytelling and painting is on full display. Though Cat tends to come off as younger than 13 (and her age is not revealed until Page 42), her emotions and challenges feel authentic to the book’s target middle-grade audience. Cat’s mentor Benton radiates kindness, and her mother’s touching battle with depression rings true. In the backmatter, the author lists several resources on related topics ranging from Walt Whitman (whose words appear in the book) to mental health.
A sweet middle-grade novel about the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73328-650-3
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Sourland Mountain Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2020
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
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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