A powerful tale of a headstrong and compassionate youngster.
A girl in a struggling Appalachian family is overjoyed by a visit from her musician uncle in Koehler’s middle-grade novel.
It’s the 1930s, and 10-year-old Dahlia Harrell and her loved ones in the town of Lothian Mill have had a hard time in recent years. The family’s house burned down, and since then, they’ve been scraping by as tenant farmers. Dahlia is frustrated that others have more than she does; her family can’t afford a radio, for instance. At school, Dahlia’s classmate Rosie Blevins seems to have everything, but she’s still trying to steal Dahlia’s friend Ruby away from her. Then Dahlia’s brother,Charlie, is diagnosed with scarlet fever. Things look up, however, when her beloved uncle Ennis, a traveling musician, shows up with banjo in hand. He never sticks around long, but Dahlia is always happy to see him. Ennis impresses the town with his songs at the Harvest Festival, but then an unexpected problem arises: Ennis is suspected of stealing from Rosie’s father’s hardware store and ends up in jail. Dahlia and her family bring him his banjo to cheer him up, but his situation looks bleak. Charlie’s convinced of Ennis’ guilt, but Dahlia isn’t; she’s sure there must be another explanation. Over the course of this novel, Koehler offers a story that shows particular skill at describing how family ties can hold everything together during the toughest of times: “There was food and laughter and warmth. The warmth of the wood-burning stove in the kitchen, the warmth of the fireplace in the parlor, and the warmth of family gathered close.” The novel also offers a generous message about inequality and forgiveness. Dahlia’s story focuses in large part on things that worry people of her age, but it’s also a moving tale about how family crises can force young people to wrestle with adult problems. It’s a concise novel, but the author’s strong storytelling skills make it a potent one as Dahlia searches for solace in an unpredictable environment.
A powerful tale of a headstrong and compassionate youngster.Pub Date: April 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781947536173
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Turtle Cove Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2023
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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