A quiet, endearing protagonist achieves a dream unimagined by many children.
Miracle (who prefers the name Ira) tells her tale from October 1987 until June 1990—when she and younger brother Zac were foster children at Skilly House in London.
In a prologue, a now-adult Ira explains that the story comes from her diaries, then switches to a more childlike voice for the narrative proper. She calls her real name “embarrassing, especially for a care kid,” and throughout, she makes other references to her shame and her embarrassment about her status. After a series of stays with private families in London, she and Zac—at 7, two years her junior—have been driven to the children’s home by social worker Anita. Anita “dyes her hair to match her lipstick.…It takes our mind off things. Maybe that’s why she does it.” Ira’s many descriptions of places and people do not stop with her keen observations; she always editorializes about them. Readers who can tolerate this large amount of exposition will eventually be rewarded, as some of the details—such as Ira’s hasty misreadings of home manager Mrs. Clanks—result in fascinating revelations toward the end. Ira’s frequent use of the construction “me and Zac” jars against her general eloquence but also emphasizes her fierce protection of him. Briticisms are abundant, and the crisis episode, which highlights Zac’s impetuous nature, plays out against the backdrop of poll-tax protests. The siblings are curly-haired; their skin goes undescribed, but they are depicted on the cover (done by Aurélia Fronty) with pale skin.
A quiet, endearing protagonist achieves a dream unimagined by many children. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3839-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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