Welcome to Litsy!

I was surprised to find out that this was book 8 in a long series by author and illustrator Judd Winick. To me this book felt like a standalone when I first read it. It gives children an opportunity to get to know more characters in depth by making it a series. I would definitely recommend this series for a classroom as it is a good transition to chapter books.

Gina and the Big Secret is book 8 of the Hilo series. This is definitely an adventure based graphic novel using comic style boxes as well as speech bubbles and lots of different fonts. The bold important words to draw focus and will use different size fonts to portray voice levels. This book packs a lot in by using multiple boxes on each page.

“Gina protected us inside a spell. The world changed… But we didn‘t.”

gina, where are we?

monsters, magic and going against the government, what else could you need?

this book is a super fun comic read about a young group of friends in a very sticky and scary situation, and how they get out of it with magic

“I can sort of sense all this…energy. power. magic.”

I think this is a great chapter book for readers who are just beginning to read chapter books, such a s 5th graders.

This is a chapter graphic novel in a long series (this is book 8). The illustrations are very appealing to young readers as the lines and shapes depict lots of movement and action. The speech bubbles are all very short and easy to read.

“We have to be careful. We need to treat earth like an alien world. Everything could be different we don‘t know the rules. The laws. The culture. Anything.”

This is the 8th book in the series, so I think I am missing some context and details that would add to the characters and setting. I felt confused and lost at parts. It starts off with a group of kids that appear to be riding on the back of a giant cat. Then the book abruptly jumps to the kids saying that everything was going to change and they have suspicions that there are aliens among them.

The color scheme are all more muted colors and not bright or neon colors. The text bubbles have a mixture of longer phrases and short phrases. The font makes it fun to read and the mixture of bold words puts emphasis on certain points.