Middle school angst tempered by humorous insights.
Pixie has contentedly played introvert to her extroverted parents, but now circumstances demand that she expand her limited comfort zone.
Mom had to leave over a month ago to visit her own ailing mother in Fresno, so the white 12-year-old and her dad, Dan the Man, must run the family business—preparing, producing, and running birthday parties—without charismatic Mom. Pixie is infuriated when her father announces, “We need you to be a mermaid next Saturday.” “Next Saturday” means in approximately two weeks, and Pixie is determined to avoid the assignment. For years, she has been an organized, quietly competent part of the business. Meanwhile, she and her less-than-popular friends join a class-president campaign for the seemingly self-assured Sophie, a white classmate whose personality does as quick an about-face as Pixie’s by story’s end. Pixie narrates in the present tense, with plenty of flashbacks, musings, and editorializing, running the full gamut from humorous to dead serious. Occasionally, her confessions reveal a tendency that seems to veer beyond shyness into acute anxiety. The strongest chapters are the lively accounts of how Pixie and Dan organize and run parties without Mom. As Pixie takes risks, she moves beyond self-consciousness and even faces her former nemesis. Unfortunately, the character arc may have some readers inferring that an outgoing, entertaining personality is superior to one of quiet supportiveness. Racial and sexual diversity exist among secondary characters.
Middle school angst tempered by humorous insights. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-30388-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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