With strengths outweighing flaws, this is a dark yet digestible visual delight with an endearing investigative trio.
A visually refreshing treat from South Korea, Ly and Park’s debut graphic novel features Suee Lee, a 12-year-old girl with sharp intelligence, a world-weary view, and a pointy hairdo.
Suee Lee is not pleased that she has been transferred from Bustle Elementary on Bustle Street to Outskirts Elementary in Outskirtsville. She chooses to keep to herself rather than try to befriend either “queen bee,” “jerk,” “dim bulb,” or “loser” but gets tangled up in trouble when a strange voice beckons her into the eerie exhibit room at school. Suee wakes up in the nurse’s office, and soon after, her shadow begins to speak, taunting Suee and threatening her classmates. While Suee Lee verbally spars with her own shadow, the creepy vice principal expands his disturbing after-school classes for “zeros.” When students begin to act like zombies and lose their shadows, Suee reluctantly befriends the shy and bullied Haeun as well as the confident and handsome Hyunwoo. The unlikely threesome launch the Zero Detective Club to investigate. The graphics are simultaneously menacing and exquisitely clean, superbly honed in a shiny palette of jet, ash, and crimson. It’s to the author’s credit that readers will be unsure about whom to root for until the very end. The wry writing deftly captures preteen angst, but the story meanders, at times devolving into awkward dialogue, and the embedded moral to the story is tediously corny.
With strengths outweighing flaws, this is a dark yet digestible visual delight with an endearing investigative trio. (Graphic horror. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2563-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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