A winning combination of sisterhood, school, and a spooky doll.
A doll’s head mysteriously helps two sisters deal with their school bullies—until its evilness becomes uncontrollable.
Lucy and her younger sister, Antonia, live in a trailer with their waitress mom, which leads mean girls at their middle school to taunt Lucy with the nickname Trash Licker. Lucy tries to keep her head down and stay quiet, but Antonia is different. When the pair find an old doll’s head by the river, Antonia demands to keep it. She names it Hush-a-bye, talks to it, and tells Lucy that it talks back. Wary at first, Lucy begins to believe after impossible things happen to those who have wronged the sisters, and Antonia says that the doll is responsible. However, Lucy soon realizes that Hush-a-bye has its own desires and will stop at nothing to get what it wants, no matter who gets hurt in the process. Creepy dolls are a horror staple, and Hush-a-bye fits right in. The full extent of her scariness is only exposed in the climactic finale; before that point, Lucy and Antonia’s realistic sibling relationship propels the story, and it’s the everyday cruelty of other kids that is most frightening. An abusive absent father is mentioned but doesn’t play any substantial role, so this element feels underexplored. Main characters are cued as White; Lucy’s favorite teacher is a gay man, and Antonia is possibly neurodiverse.
A winning combination of sisterhood, school, and a spooky doll. (Horror. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-20678-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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
Fiercely feisty and unapologetically goofy.
Three young girls are tasked with saving their town from a vicious worm.
This romp from actor McKinnon introduces the three Porch girls: Gertrude, age 12 and three-quarters, Eugenia, age 12 and one-eighth, and Dee-Dee, age 11. Cared for by Aunt Desdemona and Uncle Ansel (along with their seven cousins, who are all named Lavinia), they’re forced to live in a ramshackle shed at the edge of the property. In a classic turn of events, the sisters are invited to a new school run by a certain Millicent Quibb. Under Quibb’s eccentric tutelage, the trio learn that the nefarious Krenetics Research Association, hoping to release their founder, Talon Sharktūth, from his vault, has bred a Kyrgalops, a vicious stone- and puppy-chomping worm, which may destroy their entire town. McKinnon’s middle-grade debut is grandiosely silly, reminiscent of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events in both its sesquipedalian language and tone and in relying heavily on its bespoke lexicon, verbal gymnastics, and cheeky footnotes to deliver jokes. Interspersed throughout are bits of visual interest—poems and songs, schematics, and bits of correspondence. Though the action rockets along at a Pixy Stix–fueled pace, many questions are left unanswered or unaddressed, making this series opener exposition heavy and a bit frustrating. Still, readers will ultimately be left hopeful that subsequent volumes will offer something meatier. The illustrations cue some diversity of skin tone among the characters.
Fiercely feisty and unapologetically goofy. (map, afterword, appendices) (Adventure. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780316554732
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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