Heartfelt and accessible: another winner from a beloved author.
Fourth grader Cassie dreams of solving all her problems by winning a contest.
It’s May 1984, and Cassie Carpenter feels overwhelmed by how much she needs—attention, space, money, and more. Things that feel trivial to others are overwhelming for her, and others call her “melodramatic,” “sensitive,” and “so emotional.” Still, Cassie’s problems are real: Her house is too small for everyone in her family to have their own bed or sit at the same table for dinner. Money is tight, and her mother is too tired to notice that Cassie needs her. At school, Cassie’s best friend starts pulling away, preferring an unkind classmate. Then, Cassie receives a life-changing piece of mail: A magazine sweepstakes declares her a “grand prize winner”! A catalog of prizes accompanies a magazine order form, and Cassie is swept away by fantasies of how a vacation or a water bed for her mom might solve all her problems. But soon she finds that the contest is far from the easy fix she imagined. Hale’s gift for capturing middle-grade joys and agonies is once again on full display, and fans of her Best Friends graphic memoir trilogy will find much to love in this series opener. Cespedes’ illustrations and Pien’s colors are vibrant and appealing, capturing the liabilities and, importantly, the gifts to be found in Cassie’s deeply emotional worldview. Cassie’s family reads white; other characters are racially diverse.
Heartfelt and accessible: another winner from a beloved author. (author’s note) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781250843067
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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