A fun read for youngsters that will teach them something along the way.
Young Sophie Washington seeks treasure in Corpus Christi with her best friend and her little brother in Ellis’ middle-grade novel.
Sophie Washington is on vacation during the summer before seventh grade, visiting her grandmother in Corpus Christi, Texas, and spending time at the beach with her little brother, Cole, and best friend, Chloe. Cole is playing with their grandmother’s metal detector when it begins beeping, indicating something in the sand underneath a sand castle Sophie and Chloe just built. That something is a bottle with pennies and a note in it, initiating a mystery-solving adventure that involves following clues to find a treasure. The clues lead the trio (with Granny in tow) to various spots in the city, including a turtle release site; a boat named The Dolphin (captained by the wheelchair-using Mr. Williams) that takes them to a cove to snorkel; the USS Lexington, a World War II aircraft carrier; and, finally, the Ocean Life Center. The group stops at an ice cream shop run by Homer Thomas, whom the children first met on Mr. Williams’ boat. He gives the children their “treasure,” hundreds of pieces of chocolate wrapped in gold foil. This often delightful tale weaves fun facts into the adventure, making the book both educational and entertaining, as when Cole notes, “I read in my animal book that male turtles have long tails, and this one’s tail is short. Also, male sea turtles live mostly in the water, while female turtles come to the beach to nest.” Young readers will come away with a better understanding of sea turtles and their plight, awareness of accessibility issues, and a bit of United States Navy history. They’ll also learn about friendship and family, with Ellis doing a fine job of weaving her lessons naturally into the storyline. The book serves as a bit of a travelogue for Corpus Christi, as it features real locations in the city. This is one of a number of Sophie Washington books, and fans of this entry will certainly want to read others in the series.
A fun read for youngsters that will teach them something along the way.Pub Date: May 16, 2022
ISBN: 9781735338965
Page Count: 155
Publisher: Page Turner Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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