Sweet but ultimately unsatisfying.
After the death of her beloved grandmother, a girl travels to Paris with her mother and finds solace and resolution.
Grandma Sylvia's promised 12th birthday gift to the City of Lights is set aside when she is killed in a tragic accident. Compounding her grief, Nora is angry that her mother doesn't appear sufficiently upset. While sorting affairs in Grandma's apartment, Nora discovers three tickets to Paris meant for her, Sylvia and her mother. Also included are a map and instructions for Nora to take several envelopes and a locked box on the trip to be opened in sequence, and Nora realizes it must be a kind of treasure hunt. She decides to keep the instructions, envelopes and box hidden from her mother. When they reach Paris (Nora’s brother takes the third ticket), Nora is afraid her mother will not allow her to go to the places outlined in Grandma's instructions, so the girl goes without her. She quickly learns that her mother was intended to be included, so the two of them follow Grandma's pre-planned and gift-filled journey, repairing and strengthening their relationship along the way. Nora's hopeful, open-hearted character is beautifully depicted. Plotwise, though, the story is a bit of a letdown. Though the ending provides a sufficiently appealing wrap-up, after such a long, suspenseful buildup, it almost can’t help but be anticlimactic.
Sweet but ultimately unsatisfying. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-70808-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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