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A review by sandraagee
Grime and Punishment by Dav Pilkey
3.0
My 3rd grader is obsessed with Dog Man. She's also still very interested in sharing things that she likes with me, so she asked if I would read this book with her. I have a standing policy where I don't read graphic novels out loud to my children. I adore graphic novels, and I'm glad they do too, but I just don't think they read aloud very well because you have to take in the pictures as you are reading the text, and it can be hard to keep pace. So instead she insisted that we would sit together and just read to ourselves quietly. Smart kid, that one.
I'm clearly missing some context since this is Book 9 and I have to date only really read Book 1. Apparently Petey is a good guy now? Did he get a redemption arc somewhere? There are also some new friends that I didn't really know but recognize a bit from the cover art on other books. Even without this context, however, I was able to follow the story just fine. And...the story was surprisingly good. I think this volume, perhaps all of the later volumes, relied less on the trope of being created by 6th graders (bad spelling, weird kid humor, etc.) and stepped the storytelling up a bit.
Still not clear if the literary references in the titles have anything to do with the plot. I have never read Crime and Punishment so couldn't really say. A Wikipedia read on the Russian novel was unhelpful.
I'm clearly missing some context since this is Book 9 and I have to date only really read Book 1. Apparently Petey is a good guy now? Did he get a redemption arc somewhere? There are also some new friends that I didn't really know but recognize a bit from the cover art on other books. Even without this context, however, I was able to follow the story just fine. And...the story was surprisingly good. I think this volume, perhaps all of the later volumes, relied less on the trope of being created by 6th graders (bad spelling, weird kid humor, etc.) and stepped the storytelling up a bit.
Still not clear if the literary references in the titles have anything to do with the plot. I have never read Crime and Punishment so couldn't really say. A Wikipedia read on the Russian novel was unhelpful.