A vividly written historical novel by a promising new voice.
Two sisters must learn to take care of each other in Lindstedt’s debut novel for children.
In 1960s rural Texas, African American siblings Sandy Forte and her sister, Glory, navigate a world of segregation, abandonment, and poverty in this collection of loosely connected stories and parables. Readers experience Sandy’s first memory at age 3 at her grandmother’s small cottage in Hooks, Texas, on the day their mother departs for Chicago. The same day, Sandy is injured in a traumatic lawn-mowing accident, and her sister stops speaking. Sandy is tended and nurtured by her grandmother, who reads her Bible verses each night and sews dolls from a rag pile. Like the tales Grandma spins, Sandy’s stories seem to dance along the line between fiction and truth. For example, when she swallows a firefly on a dare, the insect becomes a metaphor for an inner light—an intuition that Grandma helped activate. A few years later, Sandy and Glory take an epic train ride to Chicago, where bullies, and their mother, Janetta Mae, await them. Their busy, distracted mom juggles a job, a pregnancy, and her boyfriend’s three children. Sandy, left to her own devices, must clear life’s hurdles on her own. She gets into a vicious fight with a schoolteacher, plots to get even with a bully, and finds a way to take a school field trip thanks to a lucky break. Despite the odds, Sandy always finds a way to come out on top. Overall, the novel’s plot feels thin, and several characters are introduced only to be abandoned. However, Lindstedt’s vibrant, poetic prose overcomes these flaws. Her descriptions of the Texas setting are particularly winning: “The sky was black as blood pudding, but our front yard was filled with swarming lights.” The text is filled with other, similarly sensory-heightening sentences: “Crickets were having some kind of a party, dancing and singing in the grass outside my window.” Each chapter begins with a poem that reads like an entry from Sandy’s personal diary, and folksy, black-and-white illustrations by Groat and Hall are also included.
A vividly written historical novel by a promising new voice.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-67-913332-7
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2020
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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