School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-Life for Isabella Antonelli is as normal as being in an extended, multigenerational Italian American family can be. In fact, it's pretty much what most families are like. But the friends at her new school don't think so, mistakenly believing she has been born into privilege as the daughter of a wealthy contessa. Making matters worse, her cousin's home videos have become an online sensation, overrunning their entire block with paparazzi, news reporters, and the occasional hot dog stand cashing in on the fame. While she's ready to come clean about her mistaken identity, the school elections are coming up, so, with the help of some neighbors, Isabella devises an elaborate scheme to maintain the facade until after the elections. Things do not go as planned in this wacky tale of a middle school double life. For a generation used to sharing as much through social media as in person, one's online presence is a very relevant theme that will resonate well with audiences. The story's conflict, if at times far-fetched, is one that middle schoolers can easily relate to in their search for acceptance among peers while grappling with their own identity issues. Palatini has created a vibrant look at life in an eccentric family with a colorful cast of unique characters whose quirkiness never fails to delight. Pham's lively cartoon illustrations perfectly balance the energy, lending a lighthearted yet humorous air to the conflict. VERDICT This fast-paced, fun read about the pressures of fitting in in our media-saturated culture is a solid addition to most middle grade collections.-Rebecca Gueorguiev, New York Public Library © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this funny novel featuring a boisterous Italian-American family in New Jersey, a burst of social media attention causes a jumble of problems for 11-year-old Isabella Antonelli, who's already juggling the adjustment to her new private school. Isabella reluctantly agrees to help her film-student cousin, Vincent, by starring in a series of video shorts that offer humorous looks at their family's everyday life. She has forgotten all about the project by the time she starts attending a posh middle school, where the students mistakenly believe Isabella is the famous daughter of royalty-and she doesn't set them straight. When Vincent's videos go viral, Isabella is terrified that she'll be revealed as "fibbing, faking, [and] phony" to her new friends. Palatini (Under a Pig Tree) writes her over-the-top characters with glee, mixing in references to food, Sinatra fandom, and hairstyles that will sound plenty familiar to anyone with similar heritage. Pham (the Princess in Black series) extends the fun in crisp comics sequences that expand on Isabella's thoughts and emotions while helping to propel the story. Ages 10-12. Agent: Linda Pratt, Wernick & Pratt. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Eleven-year-old Isabella pretends to be the daughter of a contessa (based on her actress aunt's soap-opera character) to impress girls at her fancy new school. When YouTube videos of her real, working-class Italian American family go viral, she fears being outed. Silly subplots and overblown characters nearly derail an otherwise amusing story--supplemented with Pham's comic-strip inserts--about identity, truthfulness, and media frenzy. (c) Copyright 2017. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Isabella transfers to a spiffy private school, and a rumor earns her some new pals who won't accept that she's an ordinary girl living with her big Italian family. Tired of fighting it, she lets her new friends believe she's the daughter of a contessa. For a class project, her cousin films her giving a quirky tour of their family home, uploads it to YouTube, and unintentionally makes her an overnight sensation. Now Isabella has to figure out how to fix things and keep her friendships intact. This story is told in a series of comic strips and short, diarylike entries in the first person. The strips are not unlike the kind you might find in the Sunday paper: short and sweet, ending with a funny moment that leads into the next section of text. Isabella lives with mainly old relatives and has an older vocabulary, so some references might go over young readers' heads, but the funny and engaging story is an overall charmer.--Pino, Kristina Copyright 2016 Booklist
Excerpts
Saturday, 10:21 a.m. Scene 1/TAKE 1 Attic Bedroom Closet Can an eleven-year-old go to jail for fibbing, faking, and personality perjury? Just wondering. 10:21:06 a.m. Scene 1/TAKE 2 "ISABELLA!" How about eleven and seven months? 10:21:08 a.m. Scene 1/TAKE 3 "ISABELLA!" Eleven years, seven months, two weeks, four days, seven hours-- "ISABELLA!" I don't know how many min-- "Is-A-bell-AH!" Yes, she is me. Guilty. All four syllables. Person shouting: him. Who's him? I mean, he . . . He? Sorry. I'm mostly C minus when it comes to pronouns. Spelling. I'm way better in spelling. I was solid B at Merciful Sisters on the Mount of Small Blessings. That's where I used to go to school until the place ran out of grades. I have a drawer full of forest green knee socks from kindergarten through fifth. Not as many plaid jumpers. I didn't grow much between grades three and four. Except for my nose. If I lived in Muppetland, I'd be in the same gene pool as Grover or Banana Nose Maldonado. My mother says that's an exaggeration, but catch me next to Grandpop, and it's a no-brainer I inherited schnozzola DNA from his side of the family. Inherited: I-N-H-A-I-R . . . E? . . . I-N-H-A- R- I . . . E? . . . I-N-H-double R . . . I . . . E? Okay, so maybe that B was a little squishy. "ISABELLA!" He him/him/he: Vincent. My cousin. More like my big brother--who, by the way, from now on should stay on his own side of the driveway and never ask me to help him with anything again. It's complicated. Very complicated. Lots of moving parts--as in BOOM . "Isabella? Are you going to answer to me?" That would be no. As in N-O. But if I were ever speaking to that big brother traitor, I'd be using words that would guarantee my great-grandmother making sure my mouth was on the end of a bar of green Palmolive. (Nonni doesn't allow bad language in this house. Except, of course, if it's coming from her. Our neighbors say her vocabulary--in English and Italian--is more colorful that the biggest box of Crayola crayons. I don't know much Italian, but can say for sure, Nonni is a box of 120 when it comes to English.) "ISABELLA! Are you coming down or not?" Me. Closet. Not going anywhere. . . . Unless we're talking jail. 10:24 a.m. Scene 1/TAKE 4 "ISABELL-AAAAAAAAAAAA!" I wonder if I could escape out my bedroom window? It worked for Mom's oldest sister. When Aunt KiKi was fifteen, she ran away from home to become an actress. She climbed down the trellis, hopped on a bus, and made it all the way into Manhattan with nobody being the wiser. A trellis is what I need, all right . . . Too bad Nonni took a hatchet to it after hauling Aunt Kiki back home from the corner of Broadway and Forty-Second. "Isabella!" Maybe I could tie sheets together? Knots have been my specialty since Uncle Babe taught me how to double-tie when I was four. I have sneakers under my bed with laces Mom's tweezers can't get loose. Thing is, even if I drop three floors without breaking a leg or squashing what's left on the tomato plants (which would be a whole other kind of mess), where would I hide out? Everybody here on Broadhead Place would turn me over to Nonni. Or Grandma. Or Mom. Even without a reward. (They remember what happened to the trellis.) What I really need is a getaway car . . . but I don't think I can back the old Buick out of the driveway. Aunt Rosalie never lets me practice going in reverse. 10:25 a.m. Scene 1/TAKE 5 "IS-A-BELL-AH! Come on . . . talk to me." Talking is how he got me into this mess. I might not talk to that big-shot college person for the rest of my whole entire life. Cut. Edit. Delete. What life? That's been flushed and is heading for the sewer, and I already know what an ugly stinking place that is. Trust me, I've heard stories. Poppi Flavio, my great-grandmother's third husband, who she called Number Three, had a cousin who worked in the Department of Water and Sewer Utilities for thirty-seven years. Yes, wastewater means exactly what it sounds like it means, and probably the reason cousin Sal used so much Old Spice, we could smell him coming up the sidewalk. "ISABELLA! People are waiting." Translated: Sewer. Me. Eeeuuw. "Come on, Isabella! Where are you?" Like I'm going to tell him that after he blows me out of the water on YouTube: eleven million hits in three days. I beat the piano-playing cat, which is scary. The cat has more talent. (Smaller nose, too.) It's because of Vincent and his dopey videos that all those reporters, photographers, bloggers, tweeters, nosy neighbors, five TV trucks, two police cruisers, and some guy making balloon animals are camped out across the street. I think it was the balloon guy who started chanting, "Iz-zeee! Iz-zeee!" when the Eyewitness News reporter went to live remote at seven thirty. There's a circus going on downstairs too. Almost everybody I'm related to is in the basement celebrating "stardom," including Aunt KiKi, who limo'd in from Greenwich Village in a white stretch Hummer. She swooped past the reporters (and then our furnace) making her grand entrance decked out in a purple turban and false lashes that looked like black fuzzy caterpillars glued to her eyelids. "Isabella, dahling! Kiss kiss for Auntie! What have I been saying for eons and eons? I always knew my talent was lurking around somewhere inside you, just waiting for a glorious breakout momento! And, there he is--Vincenzo, mio caro! My amahhzzingly gifted--not to mention handsome nephew! Mark my words! The next Spielberg! Scorsese! Fellini!" One of those complicated parts. Worse, I helped Vincent film that part of the part. More worse: I am that part of the part. Isabella Antonelli for REAL, spelled R-E-A-L. Which is so not the good part. 10:32 a.m. Scene 2/TAKE 1 "HEY, PAPARAZZO! NEWSBOY! GET OFF MY GRASS OR I'LL ACCESS YOUR KEISTER RIGHT ON THE SIDEWALK. I'M TALKING YOUR BEE-HIND, MISTER!" My great-grandmother has incredible lung capacity for a woman her age, which Nonni tells everyone is eight more years than Lincoln's four score and seven. "Me and Abe. Historical, baby." Amahzzing, since most of those ninety-five years, Nonni smoked more than our backyard hibachi when Uncle Babe grills sausage. (And Mom puts the fire department on speed dial when he's anywhere near charcoal.) Until Nonni quit last February, she had puffed two packs of Chesterfield Kings a day since she was fourteen. Even though Grandpop says she's inhaled enough tar to pave the turnpike, my great-grandmother has still somehow managed to outlive three husbands, one boyfriend, and six doctors. It's also why she sounds like the man who hauls our garbage. "HEY, MICROPHONE MAN! DID YOU HEAR ME?" Everybody from Belleville to Weehawken and all the way through the Lincoln Tunnel just heard her. "YOU'RE TRAMPLIN' MY PACHYSANDRA, SONNY. MOVE IT!" (As my Grandpop says, "five will get you seven" there's probably of bunch of guys on the corner right now saying that "Sonny" is stuck in neutral because he can't stop staring at my great-grandmother's hair.) I've seen her stop traffic in almost every aisle of the grocery store, myself. Nonni says the color is strawberry blond, but really it's pink--like cotton candy. Same shape. Just as sticky. Over the last six decades, a whole lot of bobby pins have gone missing in that sprayed stack of teased beehive. Except for one night in 1973 when a bent hairpin ended up on the pillow of Poppi Phil. He was husband Number Two, who Nonni married back in 1957, a year after Poppi Natale (Number One) keeled over reaching into the Frigidaire for a bottle of Ballantine. "Kerplunk. Gone like that" is how Nonni tells it. I think that's why she tears up every time she drinks a beer with her hot dog. (Or maybe it's from the raw onions.) Poor Poppi Phil rolled over in bed expecting a goodnight kiss, but instead got a poke in the eye from that bobby pin. He never saw the same again. My grandma says in a way it was a blessing, as Nonni never changed her hairstyle and Poppi Two never much cared for looking at that pink beehive. Josephine's Beauty Parlor, which has a patent on that hairstyle with everyone in the neighborhood over eighty, is where Vincent filmed Episode 3. Less than forty-eight hours ago, those close-ups of pink, lavender, and Creamsicle-colored hair already had 1,928,451 likes, which is 9 million less than each of the other half dozen episodes of Vincent's "Eggplant Wars," and the reason we all made yesterday's five o'clock news. Six and eleven, too. Every station. (Nonni had control of the remote. She has a quick clicker finger.) Excerpted from Isabella for Real by Margie Palatini All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.