A thrilling, hair-raising story with strong cultural roots and a well-developed sense of place.
A tragic event leads a tween to move in with his aunt and uncle in his family’s mysterious ancestral home in South Carolina.
Twelve-year-old Roderick Bolden has always treasured his hair. Recollections of sitting at his mother’s feet while she braided his thick Afro as they chatted about their days are some of his most cherished memories. Following an accident in which his mom’s car was engulfed in flames, Roddie was left orphaned, with only one living family member—Aunt Angie, his mom’s sister, whom he’s only met over video calls. After Roddie’s spent two months in an orphanage, Aunt Angie and her new husband, Erik, finally return from a long, offline honeymoon in Brazil. Shocked by the news, they’re ready to reconnect with family roots and care for Roddie. The trio moves into Dogwood House, the bone-chilling fixer-upper that his mother never told him about, even though she grew up there and it’s been passed down through the generations. Aunt Angie tells Roddie about their family’s hoodoo traditions, including a legend about an evil monster who wreaks havoc with people’s shed hair. Royce’s latest offers readers a strong, character-centered, hoodoo-infused narrative that’s a tribute to the beauty of Black hair. The richly detailed settings will make readers feel as though they’re right there with Roddie, and themes of family, heritage, and grief provide anchors for the creepy mystery.
A thrilling, hair-raising story with strong cultural roots and a well-developed sense of place. (Horror. 8-12)Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063251403
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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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