Uneven and unsubtle—but sweet
Lily has big plans for this year’s fall festival: She and her mother are going to bake the wining pie together.
But then Mom announces she’s moving to Morocco for a year on a fellowship, and Lily is going to live with her father and his new family. Lily’s not looking forward to it, but at least she doesn’t have to change schools and she can still enter the pie contest. Stepmom Kimberly is welcoming, but stepsister Hannah? Not so much. She’s cold and standoffish and a bit full of herself. To add to the tension, the girls have to share a room. Their living styles aren’t exactly compatible: Lily is a tidy, organized planner, and Hannah…is not. But Lily has promised Mom she’ll do her best to get along with Hannah. Unfortunately, Hannah has other plans, and soon the girls are pranking each other back and forth, often with real consequences. Can the girls end this prank war before someone really gets hurt? Readers will note some bumpy plot points, such as Lily’s surprise when Hannah retaliates and that Dad and Kimberly are so wrapped up in their own problems, they don’t notice their daughters aren’t as sisterly as they’d hoped they’d be. Seventh-grader Lily narrates in an exposition-heavy first-person perspective loaded with exclamations and interrobangs. Lily is multiracial and presents white: white on her father’s side and with a Moroccan great-grandfather on her mother’s. Lily’s possible crush is biracial, the son of a Vietnamese-American father and Swedish mother. Several other characters of color are suggested by naming convention.
Uneven and unsubtle—but sweet . (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-3922-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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