A stylish series opener sure to find fans.
A spirited princess seeks answers when members of her community go missing.
The winged rabbits known as Bunnybirds live in the idyllic paradise of Halhefla. Princess Aster, a white Bunnybird with blue eyes, spends her days singing, flying, and dreaming. But something sinister is afoot: Bunnybirds are disappearing. While Aster’s friends choose blissful ignorance (their mantra: “The bunny who worries grows heavy and slow…The bunny who smiles suits the flock best”), Aster resolves to visit the Great Beneath to see if she can find the missing Bunnybirds. She enlists the help of Carlin, a rogue brown-furred, hawk-winged Bunnybird who loves to cause trouble—Aster’s polar opposite. The pair meet up with a 10-legged Sand Dog named Feet, and the trio begin an epic quest across a fantastical and dangerous landscape until they reach the lair of the abominable Lysooth, who has captured Aster’s peers. Linn’s beautiful and sweeping graphic novel is rendered in a dreamy palette of earth tones; her visually appealing tale is filled with gentle action and burgeoning friendships. The worldbuilding feels thin, however. Linn relies on conveniences and simplistic resolutions; obstacles are quickly overcome, and arguments are hashed out swiftly. First volumes tend to be heavy on exposition; this volume could have benefited from more development. Nevertheless, readers who enjoy graphic fantasy series such as Warriors or Wings of Fire should feel at home among this book’s lush illustrations.
A stylish series opener sure to find fans. (Graphic animal fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9780823449262
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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