An appealing story weighed down by its protagonist’s self-pity.
Judith—called Jubilee by Aunt Cora and No-Talk-Girl by the 5-year-old brother of her former friend, Sophie—narrates her own tale of personal growth during fifth grade.
The redheaded white girl’s life on an island off Maine’s coast seems idyllic; she spends her time swimming, exploring, and drawing cartoons (which, in a nice touch, appear throughout). Adoring Aunt Cora lavishes praise on her niece and allows Jubilee such indulgences as immediate adoption of a stray dog, stealing away independently to the mainland, and even deciding whether Cora should marry the lovable ferryman, Gideon. However, Jubilee is obsessed with the apparent cause of her selective mutism: feelings of abandonment when her mother left her, as a toddler, with Cora. On Jubilee’s first day in a “regular” instead of “special” class, her amazingly supportive teacher talks about “firsts.” Jubilee thinks, “If I could have a year of firsts, I’d see my mother. Sophie and I would be friends again. I’d speak!” In Jubilee, Giff demonstrates an acute understanding of how people—especially children—can be extremely observant but at the same time misunderstand the behaviors they observe. However, until nearly the end, Jubilee’s introspection borders on self-pity, which risks alienating readers who are comfortably living in alternative families. The prose is graceful and brimming with potent physical details, but the adults are alarmingly mature—except for Jubilee’s birth mother.
An appealing story weighed down by its protagonist’s self-pity. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-74486-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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