Charming and heartfelt.
Bea’s family of two becomes a family of nine.
For as long as rising sixth grader Bea Embers can remember, she’s lived with her mom, close to Aunt Tam and Grandma Bea. Now, though, Mom is pregnant, and they’re moving in with Mom’s new husband, Wendell; his three sons; and their three pets. Though Wendell’s a refreshingly sensitive man who cries without shame, his son Bryce bullies Bea’s best friend, who seems to have OCD, and mocks Bea for having gotten the Most Valuable Girl soccer trophy while he got Most Valuable Player. Peppered with spirited sarcasm and trenchant observations, Bea’s narration points out the unfairness in the ways boys and girls are socialized—and, particularly, how Bryce never seems to be held accountable. When the school principal tries to keep the girls from forming their own soccer team, the thrust of the story becomes the girls’ efforts to do so anyway, aided by supportive adults. Bea’s teammates, especially her new neighbor and the new girl at school (who is deaf and has an ASL classroom interpreter), inspire her with strength. Even as Bea finds sympathy for Bryce over the death of his mother when he was very small, Bryce distances himself from his obnoxious friends. The resolution to the storyline of the obstructive principal feels unrealistic, but Bea’s team’s communal success is real and wonderful. Characters read as White by default.
Charming and heartfelt. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-287816-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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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