A bland jumble.
A preteen deals with numerous changes in Wittlinger’s sleepy middle-grade novel.
Twelve-year-old Maisie loves classic Hollywood cinema with a passion. The only other people who love movies as much as she does are her best friend and neighbor, Cyrus, her actor uncle, Walt, and elderly Mr. Schmitz, the crotchety owner of the local movie theater. When Uncle Walt injures himself on set and moves in with Maisie’s family for the duration of his recovery, tensions at home run high. But that’s not all. Her grandmother is becoming dangerously forgetful while simultaneously rekindling an old romance with Mr. Schmitz. Her mother is laid off, and money becomes tight for their white, lower-middle-class family. Her friendship with Cyrus grows confusing as their classmate Gary worms his way into their circle. It seems closeted Cyrus has a crush on Gary, while Gary has a crush on Maisie, and Maisie isn’t sure she’s ready for any of them to be having crushes at all. Wittlinger’s narrative feels painfully out of touch: these kids have landline phone conversations; Maisie’s film references are overwhelmingly white. A handful of contemporary references (Inside Out, Kate McKinnon, among others) feel forced and land the book somewhere between the intentional nostalgia of The Penderwicks and a real embrace of present-day preteendom, never fully settling on a rhythm that feels right. Maisie’s small Illinois town is a largely white one.
A bland jumble. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-58089-775-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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