A heartwarming, emotional tale of family, grief, and acceptance.
Unable to accept her mother’s death, a 12-year-old girl visits the Florida island where she disappeared in a storm six years ago.
Alice has selective mutism resulting from her refusal to believe in her mother’s death. A cultural anthropologist, Alice’s mother specialized in studying people’s communications with the dead. When Alice discovers a letter to her mother from Aviles Island lighthouse keeper John Mercury, she learns that he agreed to speak with her about what the islanders call tidings, or messages between the living and the dead—and she’s determined to go there to seek his help. Alice’s father agrees to a family vacation on Aviles, hoping it will bring Alice closure. Arriving with her dad, her dad’s girlfriend, and her younger sister just in time for the Tidings Festival, Alice learns Mercury has died but meets his grandson Leo, whose family now operates the lighthouse. Still mourning his grandfather’s death, Leo realizes Alice wants the same contact with her deceased mother he has with his grandfather, and he decides to help her. As they row out to sea bearing Alice’s tiding to her mother, a terrific storm strikes. Could history repeat itself? The alternating first-person present-tense voices of Alice and Leo provide immediacy and intimacy, while the interactions between and among their down-to-earth families add realism, making the implausible feel possible. The island lighthouse setting proves an ideal venue for otherworldly communication. Main characters are presumably White.
A heartwarming, emotional tale of family, grief, and acceptance. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-31450-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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