Two seemingly unrelated terrors gripped teenage Dan on a family trip to York, England, in Shadows on the Wall (1980), the first volume of Naylor's projected "York Trilogy": the possibility of his father, and if so Dan too, developing the hereditary Huntington's disease; and the unexplained seizure of dread that came to be associated with ghosts of Roman soldiers. The disease is in the background here, but the soldiers and the mysterious gypsies Dan visited in York still haunt him on his grandmother's farm on the Susquehanna, where he has carried an ancient coin traded to him back in England by a gypsy his age. Grandma's itinerant hired man resembles one of the gypsies; another of the gypsies stares up at him from the stream in Grandmother's cellar, as the Roman did from the river in York; a magpie associated with all the gypsies calls his name; and, midway, Dan himself slips through time and space to Roman England, where the gypsy family turns up as tribespeople fighting the occupying army and Dan tries to help the pretty gypsy daughter find a haven. Back in the present, he knows the hired man must have a sister who needs Dan's help. . . but he hasn't found her when this installment ends. No doubt the stories will come together in the final volume. Meanwhile we have some smooth and fairly complex interweaving of the characters' various manifestations; some spooky effects that are effective until, once more, they pile up ludicrously; some fairly shallow musings on time and time-travel; and a general gloss of grade-B melodramatic writing.
Pub Date: March 16, 1981
ISBN: 0689849621
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1981
BOOK REVIEW
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
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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