Emotionally resonant but ultimately underwhelming.
As his beloved older brother becomes increasingly ill, Nathan seeks refuge inside a secret magical world.
Nine-year-old Nathan doesn’t have many friends and is often at odds with his chaotic family. He likes spending time with his teenage brother, Ben, but sometimes Ben would rather hang out with his own friends. One day, while making a quick getaway from local bullies’ secret hideout, Nathan stumbles upon a magic portal. Inside, he has the ability to make creations from his imagination. He uses glowing red light to craft tunnels, a pirate ship, creatures, and more. Best of all, no time passes in the real world while he is there. The only thing better would be to share it with someone, but by the time Nathan realizes that, the crisis of Ben’s illness takes priority. Real-world scenes are rendered in a muted palette of yellow, green, and blue. While this makes it clearly distinct from the interesting portal world of bright red and white on black, the realistic setting of 1990 British Columbia is less visually appealing. Panels and text bubbles are easy to follow, but the plot itself is often vague and culminates in a rushed, ambiguous ending that may not satisfy some. A lot of emotion is subtly packed into this quick read about loneliness and escapism, and perceptive readers may enjoy poring over details and forming their own ideas of what is real. Characters appear White.
Emotionally resonant but ultimately underwhelming. (Graphic fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-20827-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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