Daniel Pinkwater has been on Public Radio for years in several fora, including "Car Talk", and usually "Morning Edition", besides shows of his own. He brings good childrens' books to Scott Simon to read samples on air. But he never hawks his own. His concern is for our children.
This book is recommended for fifth graders and up. My daughter grew up on Thurber, C.S. Lewis and Pinkwater. She wanted books that do not talk down and are not written to court parents.
Already, on the first page, he uses ectoplasm and brings in the ghost of Rudolph Valentino. It is part ghost story, part Homeric epic. He is a fine stylist; look how much he packs into a few lines when the protagonist, Iggy, recalls her grandfather:
"After the (civil) war, Granda Horatius went to Chicago and got rich in the glue business. Everyone has heard of Alpenglue, 'the mucilage of mountaineers.' It was the first modern superadhesive, and Horatius invented it and made millions selling it to a nation bursting with busted things that needed to be glued during the great westward expansion."
Always rich but never stuffy, Mr. Pinkwater tells a good story and makes his readers curious beyond the story. Give them enough sparkle and depth for a kid to want to read it several times.
The first time Iggy talks about her father's car, it is "a big Italian car completely covered with hand-tooled leather". The next time, in another chapter, it is a Bugatti touring car. Later we meet a convertible Cadillac and Packard. Since the kids are too young to drive, one of the ghosts does. Afterall, there is "nothing in the Code saying you must be alive to drive." See how he works... Sometimes, nothing is better than a good ghost story (as opposed to a horror story). Mr. Pinkwater's ghosts are complex and interesting, with stories of other times, early Hollywood or all of nine thousand years earlier.
The characters speak of doing things for years or for all of their lives. He captures the sophistication they are capable of, even as so many adults forget the expansive minds of their youth. He acknowledges the dignity of the personalities of ten-year-olds.
I almost shrink from making too much of the epic-like reach of "The Yggyssey" for fear it might appear too contrived and smuggling pseudo-education, thereby ruining the draw and sweep of the story. From Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" to PUNishing chapter titles (Your feat's Too Big), his references fly everywhere. And you know these intrepid readers will pick up on the variation on "feet", but you can play them that great old song.
I appreciate his setting the story is L.A. of the early 1950s, without making a big point of it. He sublely gives his readers a story modern in sound and feel while evoking other times and places. No milksop here; nothing to bore formative readers being informed by these important reading adventures. Here is that crazed California stucco, the Korean and Cold wars. He gives us street-loonies, police dogs, psychiatrists, moguls and magnates. And we do make it to Hoboken.
Iggy herself is no Shirly Temple and nothing is here to turn away boy readers, in fact, much to the contrary. She is strong, outspoken and has her scrapes with rules. She snubs serious Hollywood actors (except maybe Brando) that merely are showing off to each other, in favor of actors once real cowboys, spitting and telling stories of the old days.
At nearly two hundred fifty pages, there is plenty of time for nice charactor and plot development. I like good print fonts, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt could not have a better one with a more appealing layout, especially for this important audience. These are nice touches that help make the pages fly. So too are Caleb Brown's fitting illustrations at the opening of each of the sixty-nine chapters.
I like the reappearance of Neddie. Mr. Pinkwater gives a bit of nod to old Jewish humor as Neddie's quite English last name, Wentworth, is given a suffix of "stein" in a reversal of that byegone practice of immigrants anglicizing names by truncating endings such as "stein". Neddie comes from the companion volume "The Neddiad". One just wonders when these readers will first connect with Homer and smile back on these epics of their own past.
