Fun and engaging, but for maximum enjoyment, pick this one up right after reading the first installment.
In this second entry in a series centering on a land where everything is made from cardboard, a group of kids must defeat the evil Grey Queen.
After the adventures detailed in The Other Side of the Box (2021), Mac, Maisie, and Bird are safe in The Cardboard thanks to the help of three witches. But Mac’s sister, Pokey, is trapped in between worlds with Columbo, a phantom dog. And the witches need the children’s help making sense of the board game Cardboardia in order to take down the Grey Queen and save the world. The game came with no instructions, and the children can’t figure it out either, but they must keep trying. On a trip back to Earth, Maisie and Mac stumble upon a copy of Cardboardia, complete with rules. However, Mac’s grandparents, the police, and a threatening character named Weird Guy are looking for them. The story ends as the plot at home and in The Cardboard thickens. Clever chapter breaks, with the chapter number indicated by the dots on the side of a die, include trading cards of the ever growing cast of characters. Bright colors, varying panel format, and ample white space between panels create visual interest on each page, and the blue-toned scenes depicting the trapped Pokey clearly establish a separate world. Readers unfamiliar with the first installment will be lost, as will those who have read the book some time ago. The book ends on a cliffhanger; fans will be eager to see how the story wraps up. Mac, Pokey, and Bird are tan-skinned, while Maisie is light-skinned; the witches have green skin.
Fun and engaging, but for maximum enjoyment, pick this one up right after reading the first installment. (Graphic novel. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64595-041-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Pixel+Ink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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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