Timely, well-integrated themes, a vibrant setting, and well-drawn, likable characters—the diversity’s unlabeled, but it’s...
Rain, 11, knows that only a quarter of marriages survive a child’s death; she’s determined to make her parents “one out of four.”
The family members mourn separately. Rain’s burdened by guilt over the loss of her teenage brother, Guthrie; her dad’s withdrawn, angry, and depressed; her mom, briskly efficient, has forced a fresh start, finding a job in New York, where Rain must finish sixth grade 288 miles away from her old school in Vermont. Rain misses her best friend and the track team. Their new apartment is tiny; Frankie, the Dominican super’s daughter, is unfriendly; the urban density’s overwhelming. Her family is white and doesn’t speak Spanish, and their new neighborhood is a Latinx one. The only place Rain spots other light-skinned people is at the trendy cafe where they sip espresso. Through community-service projects, a school requirement, Rain slowly finds her footing. The track coach recruits her to run the 100-meter relay with Frankie, Amelia, and Ana for a city meet—that’s scheduled on the anniversary of Guthrie’s death. Realistic explorations of how grief divides a struggling family and gentrification erodes a community are balanced by the love and friendship among these diverse characters. Rain likes to count things and loathes dresses. Like Frankie and her friend who’s moved away, Rain might be gender nonconforming. Amelia stutters; Nestor might be homeless; Casey dislikes being touched. Each is seen whole.
Timely, well-integrated themes, a vibrant setting, and well-drawn, likable characters—the diversity’s unlabeled, but it’s there—make this a winner. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-265294-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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