by Terri Libenson ; illustrated by Terri Libenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2017
Classic middle school themes come alive, but they fail to really go anywhere
One bad day in seventh grade can feel like a lifetime. However, even end-of-the-world–level heartache can have surprising and comic consequences.
Emmie’s story is part of the growing subgenre that hybridizes the middle-grade and graphic novel. With doodle-illustrated prose chapters depicting Emmie’s world and entire comics-style sections depicting the popular Kate, Libenson takes readers inside the halls of middle school with the same nod to weirdness and eye-rolling angst as such format standards as Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dork Diaries. Emmie is a painfully shy girl who is forced to see and be seen one fateful day when a playful game with best friend Brianna turns into a nightmare. Libenson uses two different illustration styles to distinguish between Emmie, the soft-spoken wallflower, and Kate, the outgoing girl of fabulousness. An artist using her doodles to illustrate the seventh-grade world, Emmie sees herself as someone with no voice, while the enigmatic, charismatic Kate is full of confidence and determined to push Emmie out of her comfort zone. Though readers may be puzzled by the device initially, Libenson’s rationale for the dual portrayals becomes clear in the end. However, the repetition of Emmie’s description as quiet, shy, and disenfranchised becomes as grating as a nasal whine. Both Emmie and Kate appear to be white, but school scenes reveal multiethnic classmates.
Classic middle school themes come alive, but they fail to really go anywhere . (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-248494-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019
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
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by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney
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SEEN & HEARD
by Kate DiCamillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
Tenderly resonant and memorable.
Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.
Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century small-town setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.
Tenderly resonant and memorable. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231052
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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