An artfully rendered, sweetly impressive coming-of-age journey.
In Rodriguez’s quasi-memoir, eighth grade finds 13-year-old Steph at a crossroads in the Bronx circa 2000.
Even though high school’s fast approaching, Steph can’t quite shake off her overprotective mom, who insists on walking her to school every morning and expects Steph to come straight home after school. How embarrassing! To pursue her dreams of becoming an artist, Steph decides to apply to LaGuardia High School, an art school in Manhattan. Only one problem: Her mom does NOT want her to go to a public school. Undeterred in her artistic ambitions, Steph preps to get into LaGuardia with the help of Ms. Santiago, her art teacher. The young artist, however, keeps her plans mostly a secret, stirring up a web of lies for her mom, Ms. Santiago, and even her best friends, Tiff and Ana. Meanwhile, cracks start forming in her once-solid friendships with Tiff and Ana. While Tiff derides Steph’s art goals, Ana gets chummy with Steph’s schoolyard bullies. Will Steph get into LaGuardia in one piece? Upbeat and effervescent, Rodriguez’s middle-grade graphic novel debut elicits a lot of laughs. The author lovingly depicts the Bronx to its brightest and fullest colors, sprinkling in a few pop-culture callbacks to the early 2000s. A nuanced focus on the central relationship between daughter and mother (who emigrated from the Dominican Republic at 11) provides a potent cross-generational dialogue. Most characters are cued as Latine.
An artfully rendered, sweetly impressive coming-of-age journey. (author’s note) (Graphic novel. 8-12)Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-451-48065-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Kokila
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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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