Friendship is the real treasure in this spooky and vividly illustrated adventure.
A down-on-their-luck sixth grader takes a chance in this graphic novel about a haunted school and buried gold.
Sixth-grader Bluejay “Blue” Evers wouldn’t call themselves lucky. They're the child of a single mother, wear secondhand clothes, and live close to the train tracks, which makes them a target of three bullies at their school: Chad, Don, and Paloma. They trick Blue into undertaking a quest for the legendary Amberline Treasure, said to have been buried under the Amberline school by its corrupt founder, Edwin Amberline, and surrounded by ghosts: “Edwin Amberline will get you!” the bullies say. In the hopes that the treasure will change their life, Blue enlists the help of their best friend, Hersch Pepperman, to sneak into school after-hours and search for it. Their prospects look bleak at first, especially after they fall victim to another prank, but Blue and Hersch gain ground after teaming up with the school’s groundskeeper, Madison Beaker, who’s a descendant of Edwin Amberline. However, the closer Blue gets to the riches they'd always dreamed of, the greater the risk of their encountering a very real ghost and losing what’s priceless to them. Writer Erman and artist Criswell’s story shines in the charming friendship between the main characters. Blue and Hersch’s conversations about curses, video games, and socioeconomic status are amusing and authentic. In a dialogue about their friendship, Blue, after accepting Hersch’s label as his “cool sidekick,” asks why their peers don’t think they're cool, too; Hersch’s delightful response: “I guess I’m just a special little boy.” Visually, the novel’s style is reminiscent of a classic Sunday comic strip, with simple, brightly colored characters and backgrounds. The panel arrangement is easy to follow and adds visual interest to action-oriented scenes to great effect—for example, the panel lines become more geometric and jagged when Hersch fights off bullies while pretending to be his favorite video game character, Cranky the Quillhog.
Friendship is the real treasure in this spooky and vividly illustrated adventure.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781545811887
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Papercutz
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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