An empowering story about boys and men learning to reinvent themselves in the wake of pain and tragedy.
A 13-year-old bull rider unpacks masculinity, self-inflicted expectations, and finding one’s purpose.
Canyon Cress wants to win the Junior Bull Riding World Championship to impress his longtime rodeo friends, Dakota and Tate, garner a life-changing $10,000, and (he believes) return his alcoholic father to the great man he was before Canyon’s mother died in an accident. In the meantime, Canyon watches over little sister Josie and resents the trappings of their low-income life, including a torn-up couch, mac and cheese dinners, and free school lunches. He finds much-needed adult support from Grandma, Uncle Ty, and bullfighter Ray, all of whom worry each time Canyon climbs onto a bull. Canyon wrestles with living up to his father’s legacy as an accomplished bull rider and with the “cowboy up” mindset that means never quitting. Canyon’s mother was a gifted fiddler, and his own regular playing brings him the healing, calming power of music—and, perhaps, a concussion-free alternative to his favorite sport. The story cites real-world fiddle songs and rodeo champions, lending credibility and immersive authenticity to Canyon’s interests. Early emotional beats pay off in big, earned tearjerker moments by the end, and secondary characters’ backstories develop in a satisfying way over the course of this story, which will hold appeal for fans of Gary D. Schmidt’s Orbiting Jupiter and Jupiter Rising. Most characters are coded white, and Ray is Black.
An empowering story about boys and men learning to reinvent themselves in the wake of pain and tragedy. (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781547616060
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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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