Review of the Day: My Bicentennial Summer by G. Neri, ill. Corban Wilkin

My Bicentennial Summer: True Adventures from the Most Epic Family Road Trip of All Time
By G. Neri
Illustrated by Corban Wilkin
$18.99
ISBN: 9781536239577
Ages 7-11
On shelves March 3rd

Poor publishers. Poor poor publishers. They’ve been put in an impossible position. 2026 marks the Semiquincentennial of the United States. Put another way, on July 4, 2026 we hit our 250th anniversary as a nation. Which wouldn’t be all that hard to celebrate, were it not for the fact that our president is…well… not making us feel great to be Americans right now, quite frankly. Sort of feels like we imported our own King George III and set him up on this side of the ocean. By all rights, publishers should be cranking out the rah-rah-U.S.A. books by the droves, and they are… kinda. But as a great man once said, no one ever made a statue of the person who said, “It’s a little more complicated than that.” That means that authors, illustrators, and publishers have had to get creative with their publications. For every rah-rah book you see, there’s a book like America’s Founding Myths by Christy Mihaly. For every mindless repetition of the pledge of allegiance you’ll get something as slick, sly, and smart as Seven Milion Steps by Derrick Barnes about Dick Gregory’s run for hunger during the bicentennial. And for every rote accounting of flags, eagles, and fireworks, you’ll get a book like G. Neri’s wholly inspired (and deeply amusing) My Bicentennial Summer. Neri takes the facts of what happened when his family embarked on the road trip to beat all road trips, and ties that summer during the bicentennial into the state of the country today. Deeply fun, utterly smart, visually arresting, and patriotic in the best possible way, this is how it’s done, people.

Imagine it’s America’s 200th birthday and your family announces that this summer you’re going on a road trip. Not just any road trip either. More like an 8,000-mile road trip that traverses twenty-six states in 52 days! A trip that will look at big cities like L.A. and Philadelphia and incredible sights like the Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains, all the with end goal of arriving in Washington D.C. in time for the Fourth of July celebrations of the country’s Bicentennial! What follows is an eye-opening experience recounted in Greg Neri’s singular voice. Readers experience both the highs and the lows of our country’s complex history, never losing sight of what makes it actually great, but never forgetting how much further we have to go.

This isn’t G. Neri’s first walk in the nonfiction-photos-personal-account park, y’know. His previous title My Antarctica was an eye-opening deep dive into the logistics and reality of visiting one of the coldest places on earth. What made that book so good, aside from the incredible firsthand reporting of hitherto unknown facts, was that it was a pure joy to read. Whatever designer and/or art director Candlewick assigns to these projects, they’re not being paid enough. Full-color pages overflow with images, illustrations, Polaroids, speech balloons, primary documents, you name it. For all that it’s a cacophony of visual delights, the book is never difficult to read. There’s an art to casting a reader’s eye around a page in the order you prefer, and this book has mastered it. Best of all, it manages to overcome one of the greatest challenges of the road trip middle grade: boredom. When characters in a book are bored, you are bored. Here, the boredom is acknowledged but there will be no lingering on it. Too much to experience! So much to see!

To be perfectly honest, the book that this reminded me of as I read, is none other than the Newbery Honor winning graphic novel Mexikid by Pedro Martin. In both cases a kid is forced into close proximity with his nearest and dearest on a summer road trip of incredible length. In both cases there are hijinks, sights, sounds, smells, and new things to encounter. If the hero’s journey is to begin with the “Call To Adventure”, then a forced road trip is a real-life experience many children are subjected to, to either their overall betterment or overall boredom (or both). For those kids who would wonder why they should read a book about a long car trip that’s not even their own, Greg peppers this book with history, facts, and interior monologues. It adroitly walks the line between “fun summer adventure” and “learn stuff, dammit!”.

Corban Wilkin was the man who previously worked with Neri on the previously mentioned My Antarctica. In that book he was able to supplement Greg’s massive number of photographs with the occasional drawing. Here, necessity has made him a much more prominent player. Greg has family photographs from this trip back in the day, sure (though I have my doubts about that one with the lightning), but logically he doesn’t have anything near to the number of images he was able to create for the Antarctica book. Wilkin to the rescue! The influence of comics on this book is the key. Panels, speech balloons, everything combines to bring Greg’s memories to life. Maybe that’s why I mentioned before that this book reminded me of Mexikid, though the text to image ration is probably more akin to a Diary of a Wimpy Kid title in the end.

To explain why his family chose to go on their trip, Greg prefaces his book with an explanation of what the bicentennial was and why it was so important. He gives a rundown on America’s fight for independence and there’s even a shot of President Reagan saying the Pledge of Allegiance (which is more than a touch odd since Reagan wasn’t even president in 1976). One might be a bit worried after seeing that photo that this is a book uninterested in taking much of a deeper dive into the complexity surrounding the state of affairs in America. Indeed, everything seems to continue fairly normally, but I was happy to see mention made of America’s darker past when the family goes through the South. Greg and his family have dark skin and he mentions some of the fear and racism they saw while in the area. Still, it’s pretty standard stuff, with time taken in the rotunda of the National Archives to look at portraits of the Founding Fathers and think about all the different kinds of people looking at them. A distinct shift comes when the family decides to see the 4th of July Parade in D.C. By accident, they instead stumble across a protest parade happening in a different part of town. “The signs said things like JOBS NOT WAR, POVERTY ISN’T WORTH CELEBRATING, and FREEDOM FOR ALL THE OPPRESSED… It turns out these people had been having a lot of the same feelings I had about the differences between the words in the Declaration of Independence and the real world we lived in. But they were using their voices to stand up for what they believed in… Isn’t that the American way?” It’s a brave, bold inclusion in the book, and it takes the dichotomy of what American says and what it does from just being in Greg’s head to the streets. The story goes on from there, back to the road trip, but it stuck with me. Then later, at the end of the book, Greg takes care to include a section on “Big Questions About American History” in the back, which are unafraid to ask things like “How did the Founders treat the Native Americans?” and to mention facts like the Supreme Court ruling in 1943 that students cannot be forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance (I guarantee someone will find that interesting).

Writing about America right now is not a job of the weak. And Greg Neri? He’s no weakling. He’s an author willing to confront ugly truths and to teach them to our kids in a package that is both fun and challenging. Ultimately My Bicentennial Summer truly is a celebration of our country. It’s just the kind of thing that we actually need more than ever to get into the hands of our kids right now. The kind of understanding that might get us through our own Semiquincentennial and into the future we need.

On shelves March 3rd

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Reviews, Reviews 2026