by Richard Peck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2016
A nostalgic slice of Rockwell Americana with a contemporary filling. Delicious—take a bite.
Male role models aren’t a scarce commodity for Archer Magill, but when two of them fall in love, what does that mean for his comprehension of the weird world of adults? Then there’s all that impending puberty stuff.
Bookending his tale with two weddings (one a YouTube'd pants-splitting disaster and one a heartfelt finale with a fabulous new suit), Archer recounts his traverse from first grade to sixth, navigating family ties, school, bullies, death, marriage, and au courant political hot topics. He has a dedicated father, endearing grandfather, doting uncle, and awesome male student teacher, but that doesn’t mean he’s entirely sure-footed in following their confident strides. In fact, he’s pretty clueless in general, something his fiery best friend, Lynette, reminds him of perpetually. It’s this cluelessness that makes his journey so easy to empathize with. There’s another layer to this lighthearted coming-of-age book that makes it special in the current sociopolitical climate. Said doting uncle is in love with aforementioned student teacher: it’s Peck’s intent to spark a discussion for young readers about same-sex marriages, a topic that standardized testing and textbooks haven’t caught up with yet. Bravo. A middle-class white cast in the Midwest populates the pages, but the base of the story—navigating boyhood with positive reinforcement from friends, family, and faculty—is a broad one.
A nostalgic slice of Rockwell Americana with a contemporary filling. Delicious—take a bite. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8037-3839-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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PROFILES
by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Kate DiCamillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
Tenderly resonant and memorable.
Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.
Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century small-town setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.
Tenderly resonant and memorable. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231052
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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