This book clings to the heart and echoes in the soul for days
A kiss on the palm is at once simple and full of emotion, meaning, magic, and…wonder.
MacLachlan’s latest, too, offers much promise and wonder while also conjuring memories and dreams. Eleven-year-old (almost 12) Louisiana, nicknamed “Louisa,” and her brother, Theo, travel to the tiny island where their paternal grandparents, Boots and Jake, live, same as every summer. Louisa does not like change, and her erudite younger brother craves the stability of Boots and Jake’s quiet island refuge. Both children live with the gnawing uncertainty of life with bird-watching parents struck by wanderlust. This summer, however, is different. Jake is losing his eyesight. And Louisa meets George. Through these two changes, MacLachlan delivers a sweet, evocative tale of love young and old, the entrenched and enduring paired with the new and tenuous. Her prose is stunningly extravagant in its sparseness, painting a watercolor canvas of emotion with the barest of strokes. Each simple word glides easily to the next, making this a prose poem of discovery told as a story of interconnected lives and feelings. “Why,” Louisa asks herself,” when I look in the mirror now, do I suddenly look beautiful for the very first time in my life?” Louisa and her family are white, and George, the son of a Tanzanian immigrant and an American aid worker, is black.
This book clings to the heart and echoes in the soul for days . (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2959-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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
Not the most satisfying wrap-up, but it’s always good to spend time in the world of this series.
Beloved gorilla Ivan becomes a father to rambunctious twins in this finale to a quartet that began with 2012’s Newbery Award–winning The One and Only Ivan.
Life hasn’t always been easy for silverback gorilla Ivan, who’s spent most of his life being mistreated in captivity. Now he’s living in a wildlife sanctuary, but he still gets to see his two best friends. Young elephant Ruby lives in the grassy habitat next door, and former stray dog Bob has a home with one of the zookeepers. All three were rescued from the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade. Ivan’s expanded world includes fellow gorilla Kinyani—the two are about to become parents, and Ivan is revisiting the traumas of his past in light of what he wants the twins to know. When the subject inevitably comes up, Applegate’s trust and respect for readers is evident. She doesn’t shy away from hard truths as Ivan wrestles with the fact that poachers killed his family. Readers will need the context provided by knowledge of the earlier books to feel the full emotional impact of this story. The rushed ending unfortunately falls flat, detracting from the central message that a complex life can still contain hope. Final art not seen.
Not the most satisfying wrap-up, but it’s always good to spend time in the world of this series. (gorilla games, glossary, author’s note) (Verse fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780063221123
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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