An enthusiastic but uneven tale about two siblings and their adventures.
A brother and sister adjust to moving to California and living with their grandparents.
This debut middle-grade novel opens in Wichita, Kansas, where 5-year-old Donny has just wandered away from his family at the zoo. While the adults scramble to locate him, his older sister, Mary Grace, brings deductive reasoning to the problem and figures out where he has gone. With the family reunited, the siblings reflect on how happy they are to live in Wichita. But there are changes ahead because their parents have just decided to spend two years as missionaries in Africa while Donny and Mary Grace go to live with Grandma Cathy and Papa Steve in California. Rising fifth grader Mary Grace resists having to leave her home and friends, but the decision is final. In California, she slowly settles in with the help of caring teachers, sympathetic grandparents, and the Grandma Gang: Cathy and her bridge-playing friends LaShana Jackson and Elizabeth Blythe, who also have a talent for solving mysteries. When Mary Grace is harassed by an anonymous bully at school because of Donny’s Down syndrome, she manages to unmask the culprit with help from both her teacher and the Grandma Gang. Soon after the crisis is resolved, Mary Grace faces another challenge: A dognapping ring makes off with the family’s pooches, along with dozens of others. After Mary Grace and her new friend Justin’s sleuthing leads the police to the kidnappers and the neighborhood pets return home, Donny inadvertently gets in the way of a smuggling ring operating out of his great-grandmother’s retirement home. The criminals grab him while retrieving their loot. But Mary Grace—with some adult assistance—is able to save the day again and bring Donny home safely.
Pepe’s book is heartfelt and written with clear affection for Mary Grace and Donny, who are fully realized and well-rounded characters. In particular, the author does an excellent job of making Donny’s disability one part of his identity, not his defining feature, and treats his condition with sensitivity. Mary Grace’s anguish at having to leave her home just as she was getting ready to enjoy the privileges of being a nearly grown fifth grader rings true, although her parents’ decision to suddenly leave for their mission trip may leave readers questioning their judgment. The tale’s settings are also well developed, with the contrast between Kansas and California clear to readers. But the novel needed some polishing. There are numerous text errors (missing punctuation, excess capitalization, the inconsistent spelling of Down syndrome), and the dialogue sounds inauthentic at times (“Mary Grace said, ‘that’s what my friends bought for school because that’s what the stars wear on ‘YouTube’ ”). While the dognapping and smuggling plot threads strain credulity, Pepe is on firmer ground with the bullying incident, which reflects a clear understanding of how many contemporary schools handle inappropriate language and restorative justice. The grandparents’ relationship with Mary Grace and Donny is emotionally satisfying, and the presence of the Grandma Gang allows the kids to find plenty of adult support and guidance while their parents are absent.
An enthusiastic but uneven tale about two siblings and their adventures.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956470-26-0
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Redwood Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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