This simple, sweet story of a girl unlocking the mysteries of her grandmother’s past will appeal to middle-grade readers.
Arnstein’s debut middle-grade novel explores a young girl’s relationship with her trailblazing relative in 1960s Minnesota.
The year is 1969, and grade schooler Pam is enjoying the last days of summer camp. When her parents have to attend her grandfather’s funeral, however, she’s sent to stay with her grandmother May and great aunt Grace for a few days until her parents can pick her up on their way home. Pam is nervous since May is notoriously fastidious and lives in a house with no TV or running water. But the more Pam gets to know her grandmother, the more she comes to appreciate the extraordinary things the old woman has accomplished throughout her long life. May and Grace both bucked tradition by electing to pursue professions (May is a doctor; Grace teaches high school math) and remain unmarried—shocking choices for women in the early 1900s. May further proved herself a maverick by adopting a child (Pam’s mother) in her late 30s as a single woman. Pam grows closer to her grandmother and great aunt and develops a love of the rugged landscape around the cabin, which is nestled in Minnesota’s Iron Range. There is no climactic event or major conflict in this story. Instead, it presents a series of small, quiet snapshots that depict a simpler time: cooking chicken and wild rice soup, exploring the woods, and going into town to enjoy a butterscotch malt and peruse the “variety store.” The relationship that develops between Pam and May, which starts off cautiously and blossoms into a sweet understanding, largely offsets the stilted dialogue: “My doctor grandmother has high standards for behavior and cleanliness, so staying at her cabin probably won’t be much fun.” The simple black-and-white illustrations by Bocek do a wonderful job of complementing the quiet nature of the story.
This simple, sweet story of a girl unlocking the mysteries of her grandmother’s past will appeal to middle-grade readers.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2021
ISBN: 9798784092168
Page Count: 203
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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