Customer Reviews

Whales on Stilts: M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A got an advanced reader's copy to review through a library program, and at first I was turned off by how "little-kidish" (short, small, and double spaced), but within moments, I couldn't put it down. You don't have to be a young kid to enjoy this - in fact, the older (and, I'm assuming, wiser) you are, the more allusions you're likely to catch.

With chapter titles like, "What You Can Learn From Larry's Teeth," and a quick, witty writing style, you can't help but laugh and read on. Although it is soon obvious how the ending will turn out, it doesn't seem to matter while you're reading it; the reason why Whales on Stilts! stands out from other books is not its complex plot, but its halirity.

Don't miss it... or the whales will crush your home and shoot lasers from their eyes at you.

"On Career Day Lily visited her dad's work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation." Lily Gefelty has always considered herself a little drab next to her friends Katie Mulligan and Jasper Dash, who each have their own adventure book series. But when Lily uncovers a plot to take over the world at her fathers workplace in the clearly labeled Abandoned Warehouse, it's her turn to step into the limelight and save the planet. Cleverly masked as "a midsize company devoted to expanding cetacean pedestrian opportunities," the goings on in the Abandoned Warehouse are not what they seem (er, actually...). Lily and her friends discover that Mr. Gefelty's boss, Larry, is really a whale-human hybrid intent on destroying the world using whales, stilts, lazers, and mind control. And it's up to Lily to stop him.

At first glance, you may think that "Whales on Stilts" is a silly, cheesy story geared towards ten-year-olds. You'd be right. However, "Whales on Stilts" goes so far beyond cheesy that it's positively hilarious for readers of any age, ten on up. If Douglas Adams had made a foray into juvenile fiction, this uproarious book may have been the result. Lily is so normal that she's the perfect main character to put into such a ridiculously overdone book. The other characters are uniquely strange in their own rights. The plot is straightforward and wouldn't be interesting at all in other circumstances, but the story is so stuffed with hilarity that the obvious and cliche plot is perfect. The best part of the book, in my opinion, actually occurs after the ending - an "educational" section written by one Ann Mowbray Dixon-Clarke, who seems to have a bit of trouble writing objectively ("1. How are Katie, Jasper, and Lily different? ... Do you have any friends who are different from you? What are they like? Why don't you think that Ann Mowbray Dixon-Clarke has any friends? She bought a big grill for her backyard, hoping that people would come to cook their ribs...."). "Whales on Stilts" is definitely a must read, because who knows when you'll need to know how to defeat an evil whale-human villain and his lazer-eyed whale minions?

I had to read this book for myself after my eleven year old son was reading it and laughing through the entire thing. I found the book amusing and interesting. Perfect for my son and his age group. Parts in the story were educational. I enjoyed it and we are waiting for the next book to come out in August.

I so admire a great opening:

"On Career Day Lily visited her dad's work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation. Up until then life hadn't been very interesting for Lily."

Lily Gefelty is the only one who seems to understand that her father's weird boss, Larry is planning to take over the world using whales on stilts with lasers in their eyes. She is helped by her friend Katie Mulligan, a Nancy Drew/Buffy type whose real life adventures are serialized in Horror Hollow Books (Goosebumps/Fear Street) and Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut (Tom Swift à la Orphan Annie selling Ovaltine, only here it is Gargletine) who sports vintage clothing and turns of phrase from a bygone era.

In the great tradition of children's books, the parents are hilariously clueless. Her father does not think it odd that Larry, the boss, wears a sack over his features, has a flipper-like hand, dumps green brine over his head and openly admits his plan for world domination might interfere with the Gefelty family vacation plans.

The story is over-the-top fun, bizarre, strange yet traditional and conventional with behind the scenes publishing humor...

We just finished Whales on Stilts--we'll I was reading it to my nine year old and he couldn't wait to finish it so I finished it after him--anyway--very funny, over the top--lol! We loved the end of the book "literature circle" discussion prompts and essay question starters. We spent an hour making up our own silly book club discussion questions after reading MT Anderson's and had fun using his format to lampoon other books my son had to read for literature circle this year. We hope there will be more to come!

This fantastic tale takes place in an alternate reality where corporate men don't question bosses who have flippers under their business suit and dump sea water over their head to get refreshed, where kids gather at a restaurant that floats in the area, where a photocopy machine powered by a mule doesn't raise eyebrows in the office. It's a wacky and fun ride, and the reader will find themselves sucked in by the "Monstrous Thrills! Gruesome Chills! Sidesplitting Laughs!"

The unconventional format of this short novel makes it a true winner. It is complete with black and white illustrations of the unbelievable characters and events. The narrator speaks directly to the reader in asides and laugh-out-loud stream-of-consciousness footnotes. Plus, when the story ends, the author throughfull provides an offbeat reader's guide and list of ridiculous essay questions, along with an author interview. Parents and children will enjoy reading this book together.

I am giving this book five stars because it made me smile and laugh so much, so often. Kids around grade 4 (and up) will love its irreverence, as Anderson skillfully skewers common conventions of kid lit, television, advertising, and all the other stupid stuff which kids today must daily ingest. (The skewering is done in such a fun-loving, cheerful way that it doesn't come across as mean or nasty.) In doing this kind of intelligent parody, Anderson treats the young reader with great respect. Some kids know they are being fed formulaic stuff a lot, and this daffy spree is a welcome antidote. The plot? Absurd as can be. The characters? Ridiculous. The structure? Deliberately outlandish. I think I laughed hardest at the "questions for discussion" at the end - anyone who's ever had to take a standardized test will love it. In short, Anderson goes straight to a kid's funny bone, and a fun read it is.

Some people feel completely frustrated when they've found that a good author has written a bad book. Maybe so. Still, I feel that far worse and far more frustrating is the good author who writes a so-so book. Have you ever experienced this? You're reading a mediocre title that once in a while contains a bright flash of brilliance. And as you are reading you slowly come to the conclusion that these flashes of brilliance could be far more frequent and the writing far less inane if the doggone writer had just put some EFFORT into what he or she was writing. M.T. Anderson is the fabulous author of "Feed" and "The Game of Sunken Places". Usually he writes for the young adult crowd (though he has earned high marks for non-fiction children's titles like "Strange Mr. Satie" and "Handel Who Knew What He Liked"). Here he skews for a younger crowd and inadvertently (I like to give him the benefit of the doubt here) has written a book that reads like a knock-off of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" crossed with several different kids v. villain genres. Anderson gets so doggone wrapped up in his own cleverness that his book veers in five different directions and suffers as a result. What we have here is a title that could have been very very good had its author been able to reconcile its goofiness with its storytelling. Instead, we've the ultimate frustration. A good author with a palpably mediocre title to his name.

Lily is a normal kid and has never had a lot of excitement in her life. That all changes on Career Day when Lily discover that her dad's boss is... well, evil. Nice and all. But evil. Her dad works in a supposedly "abandoned warehouse" (a misspelled sign on the door half-heartedly warns that there are probably scorpions) where he helps make cetacean pedestrian opportunities. In other words, stilts for whales. Lily doesn't like this one bit at all and it's not long before she'd discovered a nasty scheme on the part of Larry, the half-man half-whale, bent on world domination via mobile whales with eye-lasers. She turns in desperation to her two best friends. One of them is Katie Mulligan, star of her own book series, "Horror Hollow" in which she battles flesh-eating viruses, mind-sloths, and earwigs. Her other friend is Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut. He invents "futuristic" gadgets and also has a book series of his own with titles like, "Jasper Dash and the Creosote Jungle" and "Jasper Dash Down the Volga with Nary a Paddle". With these two adventurers at her side, Lily's ready to realize that she's just as heroic as they are and that it's up to her to save the world from, as her dad would put it, cetacean pedestrians.

In that little description I've just written you can see the gleam of inspiration that occasionally shoots out while reading this text. Fans of this book will look at me and shake their heads, patronizing smiles plastered to their faces. "Poor girl", they will say. "She just doesn't get what Anderson's trying to do here". Bull. I know exactly what Anderson's doing here and I'm telling you loud and clear that it didn't work. Not one jot. It's a great idea to have two completely different child adventure heroes helping the book's actual heroine in her quest to save the world. Kate Mulligan's books and adventures are a kind of "Goosebumps" and "Zack Files" series with a healthy dose of Scooby-Doo for good measure. Jasper Dash, on the other hand, is like a 1950's boy adventurer character who's supposedly futuristic creations would only have been considered so back in the day. He also speaks like an early 20th century gentleman explorer with lots of "Great Scott"s and "chums". This is a great idea on the author's part (and obviously he agrees with me since he expanded the idea in the sequel to this book, "The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen"). Unfortunately, he doesn't carry it off.

I loved the title. I loved the cover illustration. And I loved the first sentence in the book. "On Career Day Lily visited her dad's work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation". As you can see, there is much to love:

Things to Love About This Book: The illustrations by Kurt Cyrus come to mind. Having until now only illustrated some below-the-radar picture books, Cyrus comes fully into his own with the book's wood-cut like diagrams and clever compositions. Because these pictures are such a large part of "Whales on Stilts", I was shocked to find that Mr. Cyrus isn't mentioned AT ALL on the bookflap. You can read all about Mr. Anderson (about whom so many of us already know so much) but Mr. Cyrus apparently doesn't even warrant a whimper. Bad Harcourt Books! Bad! Other bright points in "Whales On Stilts" include funny sections like the conversation between two hired goons in which they discuss how wonderful it is to have a boss that thinks up such inspirational sentences like, "Guards!" and "Get them!". There's also a long footnote that starts on page 173 and continues until page 179 that's oddly touching. It talks about summer cottages and the odds and ends you find there and the language becomes almost a beautiful little story in and of itself. I would have loved to have read that story rather than this one. Which brings us too....

Things to Not Love About This Book: It's trying to be quirky and kooky. It ends up confusing. Sentences that read, "It is a general rule that things on stilts never strike the same place twice. Except some clowns, when you don't pay them back for some stupid old Dutch painting they bought you. But that's another story", may be fun to write, but they're not particularly funny. Just confusing. The fact that the narrator keeps digressing and talks at length about his or her own adventures is so horribly similar to Lemony Snicket in "A Series of Unfortunate Events" but written so poorly that it was all I could do not to throw the silly book against the wall. Ditto the definitions of difficult words. What Anderson has failed to do is reconcile who his audience is. In many ways, this is a book for adults but sold to children. Adults will find the references to David Bowie's eyes amusing. Kids won't. They'll find them annoying. Which they are. Had Anderson written for a slightly younger crowd (the ones who enjoy the "Time Warp Trio" so much) and included many more illustrations then the book would have worked beautifully. Instead, he tries to please everyone and spreads himself too thin, thereby pleasing no one.

It's a disappointment to be sure. I was so happy to see a new M.T. Anderson book and even happier with the whiz-bang title and cover. And there are wonderful parts in this story. It simply does not hang together as a whole. If you want a book that spoofs other children's books, try "Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs", edited by the Editors of McSweeney's. Otherwise, "Whales On Stilts" just comes off as an interesting exercise that wasn't written particularly well. There's stuff to like here, no question. But don't be surprised if your child doesn't take to it.

M. T Anderson has won again. This was our winner for the Eleanor Cameron Awards (Golden Duck Awards for Excellence in Children's Science Fiction)

Well, dash it all, I have to say that this was the funniest thing I've read in a long,long time. It skewers every kids' series convention that I can think of, and adds in a David-Foster-Wallace-esque footnote (there's really only room for one), questions for reading groups and the thrilling first chapter of the next book in the series. I bought it for my 10-year-old, but I think it will be a while until he gets all the jokes. Definitely recommended for adults who still love juvenile fiction.