Inventive, ironic retellings frame this folktale-centered family story.
Through tales both familiar and new, two sisters navigate growing up and an international relocation.
It is Mid-Autumn Festival time in Singapore, and the Guo family’s gathering feels poignant because grandmother Ah Ma, Ma Ma, Ba Ba, and sisters Peijing and Biju are moving to Australia the following day for Ba Ba’s new job. As 11-year-old Peijing helps Ah Ma prepare moon cakes, the salted duck egg yolk center symbolizes the moon as the narrative theme interwoven throughout their family’s journey during their first year in their new home, through reinterpreted lore and superstitions. When the contents of the sisters’ secret Little World—paper-book crafted flora, fauna, landscapes, and a red barn, all housed in a cardboard box—vanish on the morning of their departure, only the paper jade rabbit (a legendary occupant of the moon) is salvaged and with it, the hope of rebuilding their private universe. Contrasting Peijing’s anxiety as the eldest child bearing expectations of responsibility, 5-year-old Biju’s exuberant, improvisational storytelling centers the sisters’ interactions as their lives transform in a new and very different environment. While Peijing finds her voice and makes new friends and Biju shines in the school play, Ah Ma’s declining health prompts them to capture memories in the moment. Biju’s retold legends are a highlight, showcasing her irreverent humor and demonstrating a self-assured agency that reminds readers of the power of stories’ evolution. Subtle contextual clues situate the story in the 1980s.
Inventive, ironic retellings frame this folktale-centered family story. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-8886-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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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