A story of personal development that hinges on a tired disability trope.
A pen-pal assignment changes a reluctant participant in this epistolary novel centered on friendship.
When Leo, a Toronto boy in grade 5, is randomly assigned by his teacher to correspond with Elsa, a Boston fifth grader, he’s annoyed. Not only must he write to a girl, but each letter must be at least 250 words long. He expresses his feelings in a haiku appended to one letter: “THIS IS REALLY DUMB (5) / I COULD BE PLAYING OUTSIDE (7) / LIKE I SAID IT’S DUMB (5).” Leo is dealing with a lot: His family’s move from Montreal has been a rough adjustment, he feels excluded at school, and he cycles home by a different route every day to avoid high school bullies. As they continue their correspondence, Leo, who has a tendency to see the glass half empty, is sometimes rude to Elsa, but he also finds solace in having someone to confide in. Optimist Elsa is revealed several months into their pen-pal relationship to be a wheelchair user with spina bifida. Fed up with Leo’s self-pity, she writes, “At least you can walk and run. I can hardly walk at all.” Even though she is developed as a character in other ways, Elsa’s disability ultimately feels like a device to foster Leo’s personal growth. Characters are not physically described and are racially ambiguous.
A story of personal development that hinges on a tired disability trope. (information about haiku, author interview) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780889956865
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Red Deer Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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