Funny, well-crafted, and mostly intersectionally inclusive.
When a major storm forces Toronto’s creative Lottery clan to revise their plans for the winter solstice and succeeding holidays, Sumac misses familiar family traditions.
The ice storm transforms the Lotterys’ neighborhood into a glittering, dangerous fairyland while, flight canceled, PapaDum and Sic, oldest of the family’s four biological kids wait it out in India. Again, the third-person perspective is filtered through family record-keeper, traditionalist, and worrywart, Sumac, 9, oldest of the three adopted Lotterys. While caring for couch-surfing Brazilian visitor Luiz, sidelined after wiping out when sledding behind a car, the Lotterys assist neighbors afflicted by power outages and, losing power themselves, gratefully accept help. Everyone misses PapaDum, the family cook and handier of their two dads, though PopCorn tries to fill in. Stresses mount. Sumac’s enraged when her impromptu entry in icy Lake Ontario’s Polar Bear Plunge goes unrecorded. Amid setbacks and challenges, the Lotterys exercise their “muscles of surrender.” Brian, 4, ventures farther into gender reinvention; MaxiMum meditates with steely resolve; CardaMom comforts; and the harsh weather turns multiethnic and immigrant neighbors into friends. The Lottery kids, a series’ strength, are extra-engaging; their gay dads and lesbian moms, here softened by parental imperfections and quirks, continue to curate a tantalizingly wide-ranging home-school curriculum. In this celebration of Canada’s vibrant cultural diversity, French Canada’s culture and the country’s second official language are conspicuous in their almost total absence.
Funny, well-crafted, and mostly intersectionally inclusive. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-20753-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Levine/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
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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