A fresh take for a beloved story that will introduce it to a wider audience.
Three sisters travel cross-country to reconnect with the mother who left them behind years ago in this graphic novel adaptation of Williams-Garcia’s highly acclaimed, award-winning 2010 novel.
In the summer of 1968, the Gaither sisters—Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern—leave Brooklyn to visit their mother in Oakland. When they arrive, their mother, Cecile, isn’t particularly welcoming, and Delphine finds herself advocating for her younger sisters’ needs. On their first morning, Cecile sends them to the People’s Center for breakfast and lessons provided by the Black Panthers. Interacting with the other children leads to some sisterly friction, and once again Delphine wishes Cecile would assume a motherly role. But Delphine continues to find ways to keep her sisters engaged, as Cecile expects. After an excursion to San Francisco, the girls return to find the police arresting Cecile and some of her Black Panther acquaintances. Community members help the girls, and adults at the People’s Center plan a rally in the local park, where youngest sister Fern speaks up and surprises the entire community with her revealing insights. As the girls prepare to return home, Cecile and Delphine finally speak frankly, and Delphine begins to understand her mother. Retaining the lively dialogue and strong characterization of the original, this version is enhanced by the wonderfully expressive drawings and use of vibrant color as well as black-and-white panels that highlight the storytelling.
A fresh take for a beloved story that will introduce it to a wider audience. (Graphic historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780062935588
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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