Rollicking good fun.
Eleven-year-old human Molly befriends a big, brown bear and helps him overcome his many fears.
When Bear squeezes through a window while Molly’s parents are out, they’re both startled, but Bear is more afraid of Molly than she is of him. Self-possessed, can-do Molly assuages Bear’s fear and decides to hide him in her room, where she teaches him to meditate. She also calls best friend Harper for backup. Pink-haired Harper shares Molly’s ethos (“We are amazing and can do anything we set our minds to!”), and the two spend the summer with their new friend Bear, hiding him from Molly’s parents in increasingly hilarious places. When school starts, Bear convinces Molly to bring him along, but classmate Max reacts extremely negatively, leading anxious Bear to run away and hide under the bed. Molly and Harper are ready to protest against what they perceive as Max’s bullying—they have a history of speaking up for positive change—but after Bear shares his story of encountering a bully in the woods named Bambi, the friends consider—and uncover—the reason for Max’s behavior. Ultimately, it’s Bear who helps Molly face Max at school: “I wanted to help Molly more than I wanted to be afraid.” Full of verbal and visual humor as well as energy and empathy, this is an excellent mismatched (yet perfectly matched) buddy comedy with art that’s reminiscent of classic comic strips. Central characters are light-skinned.
Rollicking good fun. (mini comics) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781665943123
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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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