Maddy’s spunky resilience will appeal to girls adjusting to their own changes.
While trying to solve the mystery of a missing boy, Maddy finds a new family.
Ever since her father died, Maddy Gaines has been anxious, performing weekly safety checks on her small-town North Carolina home and garnering the sheriff’s ire for calling in too many false alarms. When the 11-year-old not only becomes obsessed with the news reports about the abducted Billy Holcomb, but thinks she has spotted him in her own neighborhood, she knows she must uncover proof before reporting it this time. Maddy’s heartfelt first-person narration reveals how her recon missions to find out more about a new classmate named Eric leave her with increasing certainty that he’s actually Billy, as well as funny feelings for a boy for the first time. Adding to the light mystery are more areas of concern for the preteen: Her mother has recently remarried, and she and quirky Stan now want a new baby; her best friend, Cress, seems to be growing up faster than Maddy is ready to; and she’s afraid of losing the memories of her father. Conklin’s fine Southern storytelling, complete with Cheerwine, homemade pies, and pig pickin’s, blends these nuanced realities with care. A nail-biting ending brings hopeful resolutions, including a growing family that still honors Maddy’s dad. Maddy, her family, Billy, and Eric are white while Cress is black.
Maddy’s spunky resilience will appeal to girls adjusting to their own changes. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-368-04895-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion/LBYR
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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