An achingly lovely work laced with profound truths on love, death, and grief.
Go reflects on the experience of watching her beloved grandparents grow older and weaker.
The young narrator adores spending time with Grandma and Grandpa. Their interactions have a loving simplicity: Grandpa gently places a hat on Grandma’s head when the weather turns hot, and every Jesa Day, when many Korean people honor their ancestors, he gives her a brightly colored okchundang candy. As the book progresses and the narrator matures, Grandpa is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, but he initially conceals his illness from everyone except Grandma. Slowly he weakens and dies. Grandma retreats into silence; a doctor diagnoses her with Alzheimer’s, and she’s admitted to a nursing home. Mirroring the sweet okchundang, her color fades with time. Told from the perspective of an adult Go reminiscing, this graphic memoir, set and originally published in South Korea, takes on aging and death—topics many authors flinch from—with a rare mix of respect, tenderness, and candor. Love is palpable throughout, too: in the grandparents’ enduring bond and in scenes of the narrator bathing Grandma and trimming her nails. Go’s illustrations have a childlike playfulness that often tempers the heavy subject matter; characters have rounded, oversize heads, while pencil marks are visible throughout. Themes of familial love and loss will pierce readers’ hearts while also offering them both windows and mirrors into Korean culture.
An achingly lovely work laced with profound truths on love, death, and grief. (Graphic memoir. 10-14)Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781646145140
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Levine Querido
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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