A lucid and hopeful story of a troubled kid navigating troubled times.
In Milligan’s chapter book, a fourth grader with anxiety struggles to fit in at a new school when Covid-19 hits and the world is turned upside down.
The narrator and protagonist, Lucy Beacher, is in fourth grade and has suffered from severe anxiety since moving with her family from Michigan to Connecticut. Lucy’s big brother Charlie is a “yes-man” and has already befriended Alex, a popular kid (and a bully), but Lucy’s anxiety makes forging new friendships seem impossible. She’s not just terrified of being “weird”; Lucy also seems lonely, although she is close with her family. A few weeks after starting at her new school, the Covid-19 lockdown sends all the students home indefinitely. By summer break, Lucy’s family feel the restlessness of quarantine. Lucy begins to explore the neighborhood on her bike, meeting some of the residents—including lively old Cece, with her wonderful garden, and, eventually, two girls Lucy’s age who have come to stay for the summer. Confident and outgoing Bea bunks with her Granny across the lane, and cool Jade (with green tips dyed into her black hair) stays with her divorced dad and Nai Nai down the lane. Lucy begins to learn that everyone is different in their own way, and that being a good friend takes courage, especially during tumultuous times. This is a character-driven narrative, and the pace is steady and reflective. Milligan’s descriptions of anxiety are particularly honest and visceral: “‘Not now,’ I whisper to myself. ‘Please not now.’ No matter how hard I clench my fists, I feel it coming…My heart, my breath, my body, and my thoughts swirl up into a windy, whipping circle…I lose my breath.” The dialogue feels flat at times, but Lucy’s voice skillfully engenders empathy with a character who habitually eschews interpersonal connections. A whole generation of school kids disoriented by the chaos of Covid-19 and its aftermath needs stories to identify with, and Milligan’s tale ably fits the bill.
A lucid and hopeful story of a troubled kid navigating troubled times.Pub Date: May 13, 2024
ISBN: 9798869315083
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Paper House
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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