Unforeseen Consequences! Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Double Down by Jeff Kinney

Mom thought that I belonged in Talented and Gifted, so she tried to convince the school to let me in. But I had to take a test to prove I was smart. I don't remember everything on the test, but I do remember one of the questions.

Fill in the blank:

Johnny is the best at math.
Johnny is the best at swimming.
Johnny is the best at reading.
Johnny is _______________.

I guess I was supposed to write down something else he was best at. But I really didn't like this Johnny character, so I wrote

Johnny is a show-off.

Greg doesn't make the Talented and Gifted class, but Mom doesn't give up on self-improvement programs for her middle son. But Greg seems to have a talent only for non-stop video games.

Then, as Halloween decorations start to go up, Greg finds a goal that will definitely improve his life--getting invited to Mariana Mendoza's Halloween party.

Mariana's parties are kind of legendary because her parents don't care WHAT goes on as long as it stays in the basement.

But this year Mariana's parents are putting the squeeze on the guest list to only kids in the band.

I got a genius idea. If I join the BAND, I can get invited. Mom was really excited that I wanted to challenge myself. Dad said instruments are EXPENSIVE and I wouldn't stick to it.

Greg winds up with left-handed French horn, because it has only three keys. Dad insists that he has to practice every night. Since Greg can't seem to get anything but really rude noises out of his horn, he comes up with a way to keep Dad happy. He goes to Youtube on his PC.

Luckily I found some video clips of a girl practicing HER French horn, which are doing the trick, a least for now.

But then Greg learns that Mariana's parents have limited the invitations to her section of the band, the woodwinds.

But then I realized I've got an IN. Rowley's part of the woodwind section, so I realized that if I make myself part of Rowley's COSTUME, then wherever he goes I go.

Greg's ever-eager mom is on it and cheerfully contributes two perfectly-good sheets to their costume, sewing them into it together so that Greg and Rowley can go to the party as a two-headed man. Mom, inspired by the Mendoza's laissez faire parenting and Family Frolics magazine, throws herself into leading the games, and to Greg's great embarrassment, she's the hit of the party. But even with his mom there, the party is a blast, and the double-headed dudes party hearty, dancing with all the girls... until Rowley makes an unfortunate announcement.

Right when the party was about to hit the next level, Rowley told me he needed to use the bathroom.

We didn't PLAN for that.The only way out of the costume was to cut it off. Neither of us was wearing pants underneath, so THAT wasn't happening.

Once more, poor Greg Heffley finds himself the victim of unforeseen consequences, in Jeff Kinney's latest, Double Down (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 11) (Amulet Books, 2016), in which Kinney's hapless middle-schooler's misadventures continue in the eleventh in his best-selling series. The author-illustrator has the knack of offering up hilarious episode after episode without losing sight of the human side of the whole Heffley family, as his hapless tweener makes his way through those hard-scrabble middle-school years. Like Peter Pan, maybe Greg Heffley will never grow up, keeping even reluctant readers flocking by the millions to his cartoon-illustrated best-sellers.

For more of Greg's laugh-out-loud adventures, see reviews here.

Ice Will Suffice: Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed

BLACK ICE is water shocked still by the cold before the snow. For black ice, Dad took us in the car a half-hour's ride to Great Pond, where on our summer dock we tied up our winter skates.

We sped to silver speeds at which lungs and legs, clouds and sun, wind and cold, raced together. Our blades spit out silver. Our lungs breathed out silver. Our minds burst with silver while the winter sun danced silver down our bending backs.

Ice is not always nice for most of us. But author Ellen Obed was favored to grow up in a time and place and family in which the coming of ice was the best part of the year. In Maine ice comes early, first a thin skin on top of the water bucket, so fragile that it shatters with a light finger touch. But soon winter’s power begins to promise more:

THE SECOND ICE was thicker. We would pick it out of the pail like panes of glass. We would hold it up in our mittened hands and look through it. Then we would drop it on the hard ground and watch it shatter into a hundred pieces.

Soon the whole pail is frozen, promising the ice they have been waiting for–FIELD ICE.

If the fields are wet and the night is cold enough, the bare fields themselves freeze with a layer of ice, a patch just big enough for the intrepid skater for an impromptu skating rink. And then before the first snow fall, there is STREAM ICE, turning the creeks where they waded and fished in summer into highways through the wood for the skating kids.

But then comes the best ice–GARDEN ICE. The whole family turns out to pack the snow over their empty garden spot, to build up snow berms and plank walls, and at last to [pull the water hose from its warm spot in the cellar to flood their homemade rink–and there it is–Bryan Gardens–the famous ice that provides for months of hockey and figure skating for kids from all over. But there are still two more kinds of ice that make the best memories–THE ICE SHOW for which relatives  and fans pack the snow bank stands and everyone performs, even Dad in his annual clown routine–and the warmest memory of all, the LATE NIGHT SKATE.

After lights were out in neighbors’ houses, my sister and I were alone with our dreams. We would work on our figure eights, ...our jumps and spins. We would put on music and pretend we were skating before crowds in a great stadium, practicing for some distant Olympics.

Ellen Bryan Obed’s memoir of her Maine childhood, Twelve Kinds of Ice (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), is a prose poem to winter’s joys that will make even Sun Belters long to hear the sound of silver blades on silver ice beneath them, skating on and on, never tiring, through the cold days and nights of a winter warmed by memory. Obed’s lyric narrative and Barbara McClintock’s homey and evocative line drawings make this a book that kids in all climes can savor.