An achingly lovely work laced with profound truths on love, death, and grief.
Go reflects on the experience of watching her beloved grandparents grow older and weaker.
The young narrator adores spending time with Grandma and Grandpa. Their interactions have a loving simplicity: Grandpa gently places a hat on Grandma’s head when the weather turns hot, and every Jesa Day, when many Korean people honor their ancestors, he gives her a brightly colored okchundang candy. As the book progresses and the narrator matures, Grandpa is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, but he initially conceals his illness from everyone except Grandma. Slowly he weakens and dies. Grandma retreats into silence; a doctor diagnoses her with Alzheimer’s, and she’s admitted to a nursing home. Mirroring the sweet okchundang, her color fades with time. Told from the perspective of an adult Go reminiscing, this graphic memoir, set and originally published in South Korea, takes on aging and death—topics many authors flinch from—with a rare mix of respect, tenderness, and candor. Love is palpable throughout, too: in the grandparents’ enduring bond and in scenes of the narrator bathing Grandma and trimming her nails. Go’s illustrations have a childlike playfulness that often tempers the heavy subject matter; characters have rounded, oversize heads, while pencil marks are visible throughout. Themes of familial love and loss will pierce readers’ hearts while also offering them both windows and mirrors into Korean culture.
An achingly lovely work laced with profound truths on love, death, and grief. (Graphic memoir. 10-14)Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781646145140
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Levine Querido
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
Fiercely feisty and unapologetically goofy.
Three young girls are tasked with saving their town from a vicious worm.
This romp from actor McKinnon introduces the three Porch girls: Gertrude, age 12 and three-quarters, Eugenia, age 12 and one-eighth, and Dee-Dee, age 11. Cared for by Aunt Desdemona and Uncle Ansel (along with their seven cousins, who are all named Lavinia), they’re forced to live in a ramshackle shed at the edge of the property. In a classic turn of events, the sisters are invited to a new school run by a certain Millicent Quibb. Under Quibb’s eccentric tutelage, the trio learn that the nefarious Krenetics Research Association, hoping to release their founder, Talon Sharktūth, from his vault, has bred a Kyrgalops, a vicious stone- and puppy-chomping worm, which may destroy their entire town. McKinnon’s middle-grade debut is grandiosely silly, reminiscent of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events in both its sesquipedalian language and tone and in relying heavily on its bespoke lexicon, verbal gymnastics, and cheeky footnotes to deliver jokes. Interspersed throughout are bits of visual interest—poems and songs, schematics, and bits of correspondence. Though the action rockets along at a Pixy Stix–fueled pace, many questions are left unanswered or unaddressed, making this series opener exposition heavy and a bit frustrating. Still, readers will ultimately be left hopeful that subsequent volumes will offer something meatier. The illustrations cue some diversity of skin tone among the characters.
Fiercely feisty and unapologetically goofy. (map, afterword, appendices) (Adventure. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780316554732
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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