An educational, if slightly uneven, novel of natural disaster.
Gruenberg, the author of Hummer (2021), writes about three young siblings escaping the Great Michigan Fire of 1871 in this historical middle-grade novel.
At church, 11-year-old Lyle Hemmis worries about going to hell as a raging forest fire threatens to overtake his town. His family includes his father; his pregnant stepmother, Winny; his brother, Rudy; and his sister, Aggie. A ringing church bell indicates that the Eagle Fire Company is sending out the horses; as neighbor Mr. Post waters his house down, Lyle selects some string, trinkets, and jacks, as well as his father’s watch, to save. The family leaves their house, but the siblings jump off the surrey when they hear horses in distress at Mr. Boone’s stable. The children rescue five horses, including their own, named Scarlet. Now separated from their parents, the kids decide to follow the crowd, riding or leading the animals as they attempt to find safety. They go into the nearby Black Lake, but then Lyle wonders if the water will heat up or if they could drown. Lyle saves an old woman, whom he later recognizes as their neighbor, Mrs. Flikkema. In a survival scene that some readers may find discomfiting, Lyle and Aggie squeeze the teats of a horse to drink her milk to slake their desperate thirst. Lyle, understandably, cries several times over the course of the story. Later, Winny goes into labor, and Lyle worries that she’ll die in childbirth like his mother. The author’s descriptions of the fire’s effects are vivid, as when soot “burned inside his nose and reddened the rims of [Lyle’s] eyelids.” Gruenberg also clearly and informatively explains firefighting techniques of the time, and touches on salient themes of religion, deforestation, and loss. However, at points, the characters’ speech seems anachronistic; for example, the word backpack wasn’t in use until the early 20th century. That said, because the novel is set across only a few days, it keeps up a good, brisk pace.
An educational, if slightly uneven, novel of natural disaster.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9789198631784
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Kenda Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2022
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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