Exceptionally graceful and delightful.
After witnessing a brutal attack against his art teacher, young Manuel Soto struggles to cope with the trauma and anxiety that shadow him.
Bouts of panic attacks and moments of disassociation afflict Manuel, especially when reminders of the attack crop up unexpectedly. To manage these flashes of great unease, he uses his love of and skills in photography to anchor and ground himself. One day, he’s paired with Sebastian and Caysha, a couple of classmates, for a school project. As Manuel becomes fast friends with them, he learns more about his newfound friends’ plans to participate in the summer county fair. Spending time on Sebastian’s family’s cattle farm outside of town, as well as with Sebastian’s newborn calf, Manuel finds the space and quiet he needs to experience relief and engage in reflection. Slowly, he begins to open up to his friends about his trauma, joining in with their joyful preparations for the fair (Caysha’s fancy chickens are a hoot) and forging a deeper, more affectionate relationship with Sebastian in particular. Employing artwork that expresses sobering realism with hints of softly colorful catharsis, Smith provides a compassionate, gentle look at a young boy in the grip of PTSD and his hard-won path to recovery. Lightness lingers among the tightly paced, evenly formed panels, broken only by the dynamic, sometimes slanted, lines used to characterize Manuel’s panic attacks. Strong, good-natured characters and an endearing representation of young queer love round out a mighty sweet tale. Manuel is cued as Latinx; Sebastian reads as White and Caysha as Black.
Exceptionally graceful and delightful. (author’s note, resources, concept art) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-54033-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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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