Bold, brash, and honest.
A seventh grader’s attempts to live her truth backfire when she fails to listen to her friends.
Olivia Vivian Sullivan, now going by Viv to differentiate herself from all the other Olivias in her grade, is horrified when her mother sends her to school on picture day wearing a hand-knit floral cardigan with her hair in the same old boring braid. A follower of cutting-edge internet influencer Quinn Sparks, who’s Black and androgynous, Viv, unlike best friends Milo (a brown-skinned boy) and Al (a redheaded White girl), longs to attract attention. Racially ambiguous Viv, who has light brown skin and purple hair, initiates this plan for self-expression by hacking off her braid in the school bathroom. When that doesn’t garner the response she hoped for she escalates matters, creating big scenes. She helps another girl arrange an elaborate, public Halloween-dance invitation for her cheerleader crush with great success. But when she strong-arms Milo and Al into another all-school spectacle, it backfires, humiliating her friends. An impressively strong debut, this work authentically touches on family relationships, individuality, the pros and cons of online fame, and the value of genuine apologies. Supporting characters are multidimensional, and Viv, Milo, and Al are skillfully given full family backgrounds in just a few scenes. The drawings vary from several panels to full pages, with and without borders, conveying drama and emotion.
Bold, brash, and honest. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780593306888
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
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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