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Lowry, Lois

The Willoughbys Return

176 pp. | Houghton | September, 2020 | Trade ISBN 978-0-358-42389-8 $17.99
(2) 4-6 The Willoughbys (The Willoughbys, rev. 3/08) are back. It's thirty years later. Oldest brother Tim is now a father himself, a mega-rich candy company executive. Our main character is his son, Richie. But the rags-to-riches plot of the original book threatens to reverse itself when candy is declared illegal and the family fortune is imperiled. Meanwhile, the next-door Poore family, poor in name and circumstance, hangs on by the skin of their teeth. In a third strain of the narrative, the horrible Willoughby parents, previously frozen on a mountain in Switzerland, thaw out (due to climate change) and are revealed to have been cryogenically preserved so that they are now younger than their own children and thrown into a world they don't recognize. Lowry keeps all this together through the use of a shamelessly explanatory omniscient voice, a generous application of absurdist footnotes, a devil-may-care attitude to narrative conventions, and the superglue of extremely bad jokes. As in the first book, literary allusions reign supreme. Lowry's material includes "Rip Van Winkle" ("What is Brexit? Who is Tom Brady? And what is Facebook?") and Little Women ("Oh, Mother...you are such a Marmee"). It's a shtick-y confection for readers with a taste for parody.
Reviewer: Sarah Ellis | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2020

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