BonHyung Jeong

Grace is now a student at the middle school where her brother Kyle has been attending. She stands in his shadow--he is popular and everyone expects Grace is like him. But she is nothing like Kyle and sometimes his status annoys her, even leading to fights between the two. But when her best friendships with Jay and Amy fall apart, it's Kyle who helps set things right. At first this felt like your standard middle school drama between besties but ultimately the complex dynamic between siblings rings true. Ideal for fans of Svetlana Chmakova, Jennifer Holm, Raina Telgemeier, and the like.… (meer)

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.)

Grace Bailey is everything her older brother Kyle is not: quiet, shy, and more than a little nerdy - not that there's anything wrong with that! Except, of course, for the way Kyle (and his reputation and fan base) seem to overshadow her at every turn. (I felt the chicken parm dustup deep in my bones, sister!)

Now that Grace - and her BFFs, Amy and Jay - are starting sixth grade at Elington, things are about to go from meh to downright awful as she crashes into Kyle's educational orbit. Enter: teachers who expect Grace to be a carbon copy of her older brother, classmates who are potentially using Grace to get to Kyle, and perpetually clueless parents.

As if that's not bad enough, Kyle's mere existence causes a rift where Grace least expected it: her delightfully geeky friend group. When a more popular girl named Cam swoops in to take full advantage of Grace's pain, will she have the courage and wisdom to make things right with the her old gang - and her older brother?

KYLE'S LITTLE SISTER is a sweet, mostly-gentle middle grade graphic novel about friendship, bullying, and sibling rivalry. At 43, I think I'm well beyond the book's target audience, but I still found some things to relate to. (I'm an oldest sister who was perpetually upset that my parents seemed to favor / go easier on my younger three siblings.)

Grace can sometimes be a brat, as other reviewers have noted, but Kyle hardly makes her life easy. Relatedly, I've seen some comments expressing disbelief that friends would just stop talking to each other like that, but I witnessed similar blowups in my MG and HS friend groups. It felt fairly authentic and true to life for me.

The artwork is cute, if not entirely my style; the powdery white faces threw me off, as did the occasional blank faces. To be fair, the skin tone might very well be a characteristic of manhwa, while the faces devoid of eyes and mouths sometimes seemed intentional, e.g. to convey Grace's wonder at what her friends might be thinking. Mostly, though, it just left me wondering if the ARC I was reading wasn't yet complete.… (meer)