An empowering combination of food, humor, and advocacy.
Two kids try to save their beloved neighborhood from gentrification.
“This is a love story between people…and a town.” Momo grew up in Town 99. Her favorite place to eat, Noodle & Bao, belongs to Noodle, her best friend Bao’s grandmother. When the landlord sold the building, Noodle had to close the restaurant and instead open a food cart. Bao says the business is struggling. Ms. Jujube, the owner of Fancé Café, the restaurant that took their place, is trying to force them out. Momo also notices changes—higher rent, “shiny new stores and big buildings appearing,” and neighbors moving away. Then Fancé Café’s owner announces that she’s opening Fancé Hotel, which she says will transform the “dirty old neighborhood.” Momo and Bao try everything they can think of to protect Town 99—it isn’t easy, but gathering everyone together is the only way to protect their neighborhood. This fantasy world, which is populated with humans and anthropomorphized animals, is based on the real history of American Chinatowns and the struggles of community organizations against gentrification. Lu uses light humor to tell the story in an accessible way. Informative backmatter offers additional context. Illustrated in black and white accentuated by shades of salmon, the charming, whimsical illustrations highlight the food and various neighborhood details. Noodle is Taiwanese, and her dialogue is written in English and traditional Chinese characters; Momo’s family and some other characters use English and romanized Cantonese.
An empowering combination of food, humor, and advocacy. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780063283404
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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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