Groundbreaking—and as complicated as middle school.
This jam-packed graphic novel featuring diverse girls tackles friendship, identity, and more.
When black fifth-grader Faith is recruited to the girls soccer team on the first day of school, she hopes to be welcomed into the popular older crowd. But Sodacan and Marie, two cynical but welcoming white seventh-graders, inform her that the three of them are firmly at the bottom of the C team. At night, Faith draws and then dreams of a mysterious brown-skinned knight named Mathilda who whisks her away on magical adventures that help her navigate her waking surroundings. Each team member has life issues that they bring onto the field: Crushes, sexual harassment, rivalries, and cliques provide enough distraction to keep the team from winning. It’s an exciting portrayal of young characters exploring their sexual and cultural identities, but there is an awful lot going on. With so many characters and storylines it becomes difficult to grasp any singular theme or connect with all of the personalities. Hijabi MVP Nadia helps rescue the season; vegan Sodacan recruits teammates into her all-girl band; Latinx Yarelis takes the game super seriously; Vietnamese-American Huong’s busy parents are unable to attend her matches. In one of the many sensitively handled moments, one player comes out to a teammate as a trans boy during a sleepover. Happily, though it’s stylized, Johnson’s art successfully individuates the many characters, aided by Czap’s soft pastels. Readers will be sorry there are no additional volumes planned to flesh out these characters further.
Groundbreaking—and as complicated as middle school. (Graphic fiction. 8-14)Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62672-357-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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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