Domestic kerfuffles weathered by plenty of love and sweet cajeta.
Growing pains afflict a prospective blended family when matriarch Tía Enriqueta announces that she won’t be attending the wedding.
Twins Raquel and Lucinda Mendoza and their soon-to-be stepsister, Juliette Viramontes, got past some rough patches in The Do-Over (2022), but several remain to be navigated in this sequel—particularly after Marcos and Sylvia, their respective parents, decide to move the wedding to the Viramontes family’s ancestral ranch in Mexico and Sylvia’s Tía Enriqueta digs in her heels, claiming that it’s all happening too quickly. How to, as the title frames it, win her over? Though mostly focusing on the family issue, Torres tucks new cousins and other relatives, cute goats to milk, a hidden treehouse, an old diary, and even a couple of secret passages into a fluid narrative inflected by the language, foods, and values of its Latine cast. The younger set gets together for delicious adventures in the kitchen as they concoct obleas, caramel sweets inspired by a secret family recipe. Meanwhile, Raquel and Enriqueta bond in mutual recognition that both are batalladora—tough. This bonding ultimately leads to a properly festive ceremony…and life-altering decisions for the three seventh graders as well. Torres again tells a warmhearted tale in which personalities clash and mesh on the way to a loving resolution.
Domestic kerfuffles weathered by plenty of love and sweet cajeta. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781338818901
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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
Telgemeier’s bold colors, superior visual storytelling, and unusual subject matter will keep readers emotionally engaged and...
Catrina narrates the story of her mixed-race (Latino/white) family’s move from Southern California to Bahía de la Luna on the Northern California coast.
Dad has a new job, but it’s little sister Maya’s lungs that motivate the move: she has had cystic fibrosis since birth—a degenerative breathing condition. Despite her health, Maya loves adventure, even if her lungs suffer for it and even when Cat must follow to keep her safe. When Carlos, a tall, brown, and handsome teen Ghost Tour guide introduces the sisters to the Bahía ghosts—most of whom were Spanish-speaking Mexicans when alive—they fascinate Maya and she them, but the terrified Cat wants only to get herself and Maya back to safety. When the ghost adventure leads to Maya’s hospitalization, Cat blames both herself and Carlos, which makes seeing him at school difficult. As Cat awakens to the meaning of Halloween and Day of the Dead in this strange new home, she comes to understand the importance of the ghosts both to herself and to Maya. Telgemeier neatly balances enough issues that a lesser artist would split them into separate stories and delivers as much delight textually as visually. The backmatter includes snippets from Telgemeier’s sketchbook and a photo of her in Día makeup.
Telgemeier’s bold colors, superior visual storytelling, and unusual subject matter will keep readers emotionally engaged and unable to put down this compelling tale. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-54061-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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