A timely and compelling family journey.
A family flees Hong Kong for the U.S. to escape Covid-19 only to face many complex obstacles.
Ten-year-old Knox, the middle child of three, is constantly in motion and creating messes. When he’s not annoying his older brother, Bowen, or playing with his younger sister, Lea, he’s kicking around his soccer ball. When reports of a novel coronavirus in China surface in January 2020, his family makes a drastic decision: Knox, his siblings, and their Chinese mom will relocate to their house in the Bay Area for a month while their White American dad stays behind for work. Initially their mother paints a vision of an ideal America filled with opportunities and the best health care in the world, but the kids find the reality at times unsavory. Gradually, Knox and his siblings encounter complications in their new lives, among them, their mother’s job loss, racism, and an ADHD diagnosis for Knox. Undeterred, they decide to collaborate on Operation Dad Come Over, hoping to earn enough money to bring their father to the U.S. The siblings embark on several haphazard moneymaking schemes that result in chaos—and definite growth. The coincidental timing of some plot points feels like a bit of a stretch, but Yang deftly touches on complex issues including China–Hong Kong relations, racism, the grief of separation and dislocation, and the pandemic, all while maintaining a hopeful tone.
A timely and compelling family journey. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-8830-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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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