Sweet and memorable.
A middle schooler discovers that her prickly, estranged grandmother has a soft spot.
Catarina Arden-Blume’s father has not spoken to his mother ever since she objected to his marrying a Christian. He rejects organized religion, though Cat’s mom encourages her daughter to explore her Jewish heritage. And whether Cat feels awkward about it or not, she’s about to be confronted with it, because she’s been invited to her father’s hometown of Baton Rouge this summer, where she’ll meet her grandmother for the first time. Safta is a little scary, and Cat’s one-year-older (but far more worldly) cousin, Lexie, is more interested in sneaking around with her boyfriend than she is in hanging out. But adult discipline wins out, and soon the two cousins are working at Gerta’s, the family department store, a behemoth in size and local significance. When Cat investigates a storeroom Safta keeps locked, she discovers a trove of information that may explain why German-born Safta doesn’t like to talk about the past—and why the store’s employees so love and respect a woman Cat has only known to be intolerant. Narrated as a letter to Safta, this thoughtful story is at times melancholy and at times delightfully deadpan, more focused on the intergenerational relationship than teaching about the Shoah. Despite the tantalizing promise of the title, so few pages are devoted to the uncovered secret that its significance is easy to miss and the story could be read as a more general lesson on respecting elders.
Sweet and memorable. (author's note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-20364-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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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