A dreamy, imaginative premise gives way to pensive catharsis.
Stranded runaways end up at a house where a family of monsters live.
Mirabelle has always lived at the House of Rookhaven, a magical place with passages from another world. When the Glamour that protects the house and its inhuman residents falls, orphaned siblings Tom and Jem arrive in need of help. Mirabelle, a misfit among misfits, champions helping the two and quickly befriends Jem. Beauty is found through the horror, from carnivorous flowers to a beautiful lady who transforms into a swarm of spiders and other gothic monsters in residence. The mood is set through exquisite black-and-white illustrations, featuring both silhouettes and delicate linework, and through the collective fog of grief—the story is set in England shortly after World War II. Mystery comes in the form of the oldest member of the Rookhaven family—Piglet, declared dangerous and locked away but who knows that change is coming; it’s only a matter of time until Piglet is freed. Themes of grief, empathy, and the nature of monsters play out as danger arrives from an unexpected source. While the ending concludes the imminent dangers and storylines, enough mysteries remain for the fictional world to be revisited. Third-person viewpoints shift among Mirabelle, Jem, a boy from Rookhaven village named Freddie, and occasionally Piglet. Characters default to White.
A dreamy, imaginative premise gives way to pensive catharsis. (Fantasy. 8-14)Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-62394-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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