Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth (and five sequels); Gina -- The Girl Who Broke the World (and two sequels)

Outstanding! (As Hilo would say.) I do not know how with two children I have hitherto been unaware of the Hilo graphic novels, but indeed I did not know about them at all until a friend who was cleaning out her older kids' book collection offered them to A., and then I forgot about them until A. told me I needed to read them.

I don't know, y'all, these are graphic novels aimed towards the Dog Man demographic, I guess 8-year-old kids or so? they are definitely written on an 8-year-old level (complete with the old "let's erase everyone's memory" trick used a couple of times)... and somehow they were also a shot straight at my id. Maybe it's that I was getting over a cold when I read them and so my mental state was that of an 8-year-old. Or that the author was apparently influenced by Calvin and Hobbes and that went into some deep places in my brain. But I plowed through all 6 of the first set of books, and 3 of the next set, without being very aware that I was not absolutely the target audience. And indeed, what it shares so poignantly with C&H is that sense of deep joy. Hilo's very being just emanates joy. He has other kinds of emotions, too, but joy is the one that just radiates from the page.

But also all the characters are The Best and I have a lot of feelings about them! DJ and his large family that is so busy that they don't sit down to eat, but always have room for a few more, why not? Lisa, my fave, the little sister who starts getting suspicious about all the suspicious things going on that the other family members are too busy to pay attention to! Gina who wants to do STEM-y things and not do cheerleading, and her cheerleading-crazy family! Hilo and the ones who make up Hilo's backstory! Polly, who shows up in the second book and basically steals every scene!

The other thing about these books is that they are so wildly inventive. I read book one and thought, wow, that was good, but there's no way the author can pull that off for more than one book. Nope, he pulls it off for the five more in the series. It reminded me a little of how in The Good Place, I thought I knew what was coming in the second season, and then everything I thought was going to happen in the entire season happened in one episode. Loved these books madly, loved all the crazy hijinks madly, loved the deep compassion for all the characters madly.

The Gina books slow down a bit; they are still wildly inventive and with the same awesome characters, but by the nature of the series they have to be a tiny bit more serious, and so the set doesn't have quite the same exuberance that made me love the first six Hilo books so very much (which also do get more serious as they go along, but since it's all part of the same arc it's a little more gradual). But they are still great.

Spoilers

IZZY. Izzy was absolutely my favorite, no one will be surprised to hear. ALL THE PIECES FIT. I legit cried over her.

It's interesting -- some books I have a lot to say about, and I don't have very much to say about these; they're not the kind of books that I feel the need to chew over. (And, I mean. They're written for 8-year-olds.) They're just so joyous that I loved them very much.

HAZZAH!