Chapter book meets graphic novel in this first book in the series everyone will be talking about. Like most kids, Frankie Pickle hates cleaning his room. But what happens when his mom says he never has to clean it again? For Frankie and his unstoppable imagination, it means he and his sidekick, Argyle, can become explorers swinging on vines, forging paths through piles of clothes, and scooting past lava pits. They can perform flawless surgery on a broken action figure. They can spend time in the big house. They can even become superheroes. But when junk piles grow too high, will all this imagining be enough to conquer . . . the closet of DOOM?
Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Special Offers and Product Promotions
- This item is eligible for our 4-for-3 promotion. Eligible products include select Books and Home & Garden items. Buy any 4 eligible items and get the lowest-priced item free. Here's how (restrictions apply)
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Grade 2-4–Franklin Lorenzo Piccolini is a fourth grader with a big imagination and an alter ego named Frankie Pickle, an amalgam of pop-culture icons from Indiana Jones to Batman. His messy room spawns an adventure that ends when the filth is too much even for him. Wight matches a silly story to black-and-white cartoon graphics in a chapter-book format. Readers who have graduated from Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants and Ricky Ricotta series (both Scholastic) will be charmed by this longer story.–Lisa Egly Lehmuller, St. Patrick's Catholic School, Charlotte, NC
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Eric Wight’s debut graphic novel, My Dead Girlfriend, was nominated for YALSA’s 2008 Great Graphic Novels for Teens list. His comicbook adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay helped garner the Eisner and Harvey awards for Best Anthology. He was also the ghost artist for Seth Cohen on the hit TV show The O.C.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Eric Wight is the author and illustrator of FRANKIE PICKLE, a new chapter book series published by Simon & Schuster. Prior to that, he was an animator for almost ten years for such companies as Walt Disney, Warner Bros., and Cartoon Network. Wight's comic book adaptation of the AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY helped garner both the Harvey and Eisner Awards for Best Anthology, as well as the Russ Manning Award for Most Promising Newcomer, and his debut graphic novel MY DEAD GIRLFRIEND was listed among the 2008 Great Graphic Novels for Teens by YALSA. His artwork has also been prominently featured on such television series as THE O.C. and SIX FEET UNDER.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pickle little, talk-a-little,
By
This review is from: Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom (Hardcover)
In the past, it was easy to figure out what children's books fit where. Thirty-two pages that are 11 X 8 inches? Picture books. Thirty-two chapters of smallish print? Older middle-grade fiction. See? Piece o' cake. Then graphic novels had to come in and throw the whole system in the blender. At first it was easy to catalog them. You have comic book panels and speech balloons? In the new Graphic Novel section of the library you go. Then "Captain Underpants" came along and ruined everything. Wait . . you have speech balloons and long passages of text? Images and words mixing it up willy-nilly with nary a by-your-leave? Impossible! Inconceivable! But there it was. The result? Meet "Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom". The first in a series, Frankie's books are the natural successor to "Captain Underpants", stirring together pictures and words in a raucous melding that's bound to entrance reluctant readers, but still be enough fun to lure in hardcore comic book fans. Expertly penned with a wry sense of humor entirely its own, Frankie's a welcome addition to a difficult to define category.
It's the worst of all possible worlds. A beautiful day, video games to be played, and what does Franklin Lorenzo Piccolini (a.k.a. Frankie Pickle)'s mom tell him to do? Clean his room. Fortunately Frankie has a wild enough imagination to get him through anything. One gigantic robot fight later and his room isn't the least bit clean. In fact, it's worse! But instead of punishing him, Frankie's mom strikes a deal. He doesn't have to clean up his room, but whatever the consequences are, he'll have to deal with them himself. Frankie agrees readily, but soon the delights of filth turn out to have problems enough of their own. When it comes down to the writing and the art, they both work but I'm probably more a fan of the latter than the former. Not that the plotting has anything wrong with it. Wight includes plenty of details that I've not seen done in a children's book before. While everything from "Calvin & Hobbes" to "Harold and the Purple Crayon" has used the motif of bringing a child's imagination to life, there are some ideas in here that are wholly Wight. For example, at one point Frankie falls through a veritable ocean of his own stuff. In doing so he is able to see all the stuff he might own in the past, present, and future. Other things I liked, a mock version of Dora the Explorer as the French Avril the Traveler ("Bonjour, mes amis!"). The rat sidekick in the beret is a nice touch. Or the robot with the catchphrase "It's Hammerin' Time". A pity it's not wearing Hammer Pants as well. Finally, any book that shows a clean room and then calls it "a museum of awesome" has my love. Still, it's Wight's art that's the real draw. There's a clean-lined, almost angular style to it. Wight takes the time to shake up the panels, angles, and fonts when needs be. I'm also going to assume that it's not easy to constantly have to figure out where the written text, as opposed to the panel text, goes on a given page. In a comic book an artist has to be constantly aware of where the speech balloons and narrative appear. But at least the characters aren't constantly peeking out from behind a paragraph, or twisting to avoid a run-on sentence. On each page Wight has to constantly keep in mind where image gives way to text or text bows in the face of image. He makes it look easy, and it's not. There's some sophisticated work going on behind the scenes here. Let's now talk about Frankie's mom. For reasons entirely of my own, Frankie's mom became my favorite character in the book (sorry, Argyle). Here's my reasoning on this. At one point in the novel Frankie pretends that he is defending the city against a malicious giant robot attack. Grateful Mayor Mom then enters the room and is wearing the greatest outfit of all time. It's kind of tiny, so you may miss it, but essentially she's decked out in a top hat, mayoral sash, and fishnet stockings. Between the grandmother in the "Magic Trixie" books sporting open toed leopard print boots and these stockings, children's literary fare is getting its share of eccentric outfitting. I have other reasons for enjoying the presence of Frankie's mom besides her son's strange interpretations of mayoral fashion, though. To look at her, Mrs. Piccolini is every bit the 1950s housewife, from her neat bob to her Capri pants. However, if you happen to take a close look at the family dynamics at work here, you'll see that it's actually Frankie's dad who does the cooking in the household. Woot! I doubt not that in some libraries "Frankie Pickle" is going to get seriously confused with "Magic Pickle" (another great graphic novel series, only that one actually stars a real pickle). However, for those library systems in the know "Frankie Pickle" is going to find its fan base without any difficulty or confusion. For those kids in need of a transitional book between comics and novels, Wight provides. A good early chapter book, and fun to boot. Boys, girls, and small white well-read dogs will all be able to enjoy Frankie's adventure and hope that the future yields more. Real good.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must-read for the early elementary school set,
By
This review is from: Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom (Hardcover)
Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom is a real find - perfect book for that emergent/reluctant boy reader. It's a graphic novel / chapter book hybrid aimed at early readers - I'd recommend it for a slightly younger crowd than the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney or the Dodger and Me series by Jordan Sonnenblick. The publisher's recommended age range, and I agree, is 7 to 10. Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom is fast-paced, funny, and kid friendly, with a nice merging of text chapters and comic sequences. This is one that all libraries should add to their arsenal.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Hybrid for Passionate and Reluctant Readers,
By
This review is from: Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom (Hardcover)
I nearly didn't get to review Eric Wight's Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom. When it arrived in the mail, my son, a voracious reader of both chapter books and comics, pounced on it, read it from cover to cover immediately and then refused to hand it over. He wanted to take it to school; he wanted to read it again; he wanted to have it on his shelf in his room. He kept relating parts of it, repeating bits of dialogue. And he put the next installment in the Frankie Pickle series--Frankie Pickle and the Pine Run 3000--on his Christmas list. (I do discourage Christmas lists in June, but he's unstoppable. He also expects Santa to produce a super sonic car and a mind-operated Wii controller, so a book not due out until February is the most realistc item on his list.)
Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom is a hybrid, part comic book, part chapter book. Frankie has one of those "active" imaginations, and when he finds himself playing the role of an Indiana Jones style adventurer or a city-protecting superhero--always accompanied by his sidekick, Argyle the Westie Terrier--his adventures are related in comic book form. When he's Frankie Piccolini, a regular kid dealing with a regular kid's problems (an obnoxiously sporty older sister, a needy baby sister, and a fantastically messy room) the story is related in chapter book prose. The boy (or girl) who slips easily into daydream fantasies is classic material for children's literature, and similar techniques have been used in both film and literature. What's surprising here is how well the hybrid form works to relate the inner workings of Frankie's mind. Despite bouncing between comic s and prose, fantasy and reality, the story progresses seamlessly. The prose in the chapter book portions is punchy, comedic and fastmoving. And the illustrations bleed out of the comics to invade the prose chapters. At the same time, elements from reality slip into Frankie's comic book fantasies, and all the moving parts mesh together around Frankie's one central problem. Frankie Pickle is also a wonderful tribute to both contemporary graphic novels and classic comic books. The drawings, with simple, bold figures, are nonetheless cinematically framed, with establishing shots, point-of-view frames and evoctive camera angles, giving the art in Frankie Pickle a certain sophistication. At the same time Frankie Pickle, with its fast pace and goofy puns, reminds me of the classic comics from my childhood . It even incorporates "extra features" including a two page tutorial on how to draw Frankie and Argyle and a four page Franke Pickle bonus comic. Let's not forget to mention how attractive Frankie Pickle may look to educators eager to convert new readers. For my son, who loves reading, Frankie Pickle was simply an extra delectable treat. But it's comic book elements could be a big draw for reluctant readers as well, perhaps providing just the ticket to the marvelously rich and delightful world of literature. Originally posted at Critique de Mr Chompchomp mrchompchomp.blogspot.com
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
