A moving, engrossing story of a girl’s transformative change and strengthened sense of belonging.
A Chinese American tween learns that what’s on the inside matters most during a summer living with her grandparents in their small Midwestern town.
When her grandfather falls ill, 11-year-old Maizy and her food stylist mother leave their home in Los Angeles to spend the summer with her grandparents in Last Chance, Minnesota. Maizy, who hasn’t seen Oma and Opa since she was 8, puzzles over mysteries during their stay. Mom and Oma don’t get along; a wall of the Golden Palace, the family’s Chinese restaurant, is covered in old photos; and someone is targeting the restaurant with racist attacks. As Maizy searches for answers while helping to care for Opa, battling homesickness, and making a new friend, she learns that people aren’t always as they seem on the outside. She learns about Lucky Chen, her great-great-grandfather, who immigrated to the U.S. from China in the 1860s, and the impact of his story on her family today, which in turn leads her to help others uncover their own families’ secrets. The pace is lively and the writing strong, seamlessly weaving together themes of belonging, racism, and anti-immigration sentiment. Each member of the large cast of characters from multiple times and locations is vividly portrayed, and a variety of subplots—that might be confusing in less skilled hands—keeps reader interest high.
A moving, engrossing story of a girl’s transformative change and strengthened sense of belonging. (author’s note, recipe, resources) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-984830-25-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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