Tackles highly sensitive subjects without the necessary care.
Almost a year after his sister Katie dies, Jude Banks turns himself in for her murder.
Jude is 12. Katie, less than a year younger, had been accelerated at school and started seventh grade alongside him. Before her death, the siblings were inseparable; afterward, Jude and his mother and father are awash with grief. Jude starts therapy and joins a sibling loss group where he makes friends with Clementine, who, like Jude, feels responsible for her sister’s death. Hood, whose own experience of tragic loss has informed some of her previous books, writes well, but she does not handle this subject matter appropriately for the target reading audience. The book slides back and forth unevenly in time, making it difficult for young readers to track Jude’s healing. Jude’s voice never sounds like that of a modern middle schooler—he’s alternately too innocent or too adult. His parents are one-dimensional. The book focuses relentlessly on awful details of grief, from Jude’s descriptively imagining his sister’s autopsy to a painful revelation about a baby that died to riffs on strange ways children have been killed. There is never any emotional let-up. Worst of all, when one character attempts suicide, several aspects of the narrative directly contraindicate best practices for safely discussing the topic in order to minimize the risk of suicide contagion. Many books have covered this subject matter well for this age group; young readers would do better elsewhere.
Tackles highly sensitive subjects without the necessary care. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-09407-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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