Customer Reviews

Whales On Stilts! (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lily is just a normal girl. Her best friends are anything but normal. One is Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut. He can invent anything! Her other best friend is a super hero that has her own series of book and active fan club. Lily leads a normal life until one day she visits her father's office as part of a school assignment. While there she makes a startling discovery! Her father's company is making stilts for evil robotic whales that plan to take over the word. It's all up to Lily and her friends to save the day! This book reminded us of the Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" stories. It's very random and full of humor!

This book was the first in the popular Pals in Peril series and got a lot of awards, including the Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Book. My daughter loves these books and wanted me to read this one.

Lily accompanies her father to work for Career Day, sees his workplace in an abandoned warehouse (complete with secret laboratory), and soon suspects that her father's working for someone who wants to take over the world. Her dad, though, is oblivious to all the clues around him. She enlists her friend Katie Mulligan, herself the heroine of a book series, and Jasper Dash, a techno-savvy hero of a book series from the 1950's. But this is Lily's book. She's the one who does most of the thinking and figuring out.

It takes some thinking and figuring out to connect the dots on the wild and wacky stuff that's going on. All the adults are oblivious to the danger posed by a bad guy with a grudge against the world, who mysteriously dumps buckets of brine on himself and wears a burlap sack over his head all the time. Jasper earnestly tries to come to the rescue with vintage machines, such as the photocopier powered by a mule, and the rocket car that might go as fast as 35 miles an hour.

Will there be an invasion of whales on stilts? If so, will Lily and friends be able to thwart the invasion?

What do I think? I thought this book was very silly and fun, and even had some suspenseful parts. The characters are well-drawn, and I enjoyed that. Jasper, the gadget guy who's a flop, is particularly funny.

Is there any type of story MT Anderson can't pull off? Whales on Stilts is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. His droll asides, the deadpan humor, and extreme situations make this a tale that reluctant readers will gobble up!

I really wanted to dislike this book.

As a big fan of the old juvenile series books Mr. Anderson is making fun of here, I've found most attempts at satirizing them pretty lame, despite the fact that I fully recognize they have been ripe for satire since at least the turn of the century...

from the 19th to the 20th Centuries that is.

In addition IMHO Mr. Anderson is only about half as funny as he thinks he is. Having Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, come up with a way to secretly record all photocopies made in the villain's lair onto one convenient, 220 pound wax roll instead of a modern recording medium is kind of funny.

Having Jasper select for the getaway car something with a top speed of 35 mph instead of faster vehicles he already owns because they're not rocket-powered, is not.

And the only word appropriate for describing most of the too frequent authorial asides is tedious. However, I have to admit that Mr. Anderson's story slowly grew on me, kind of like a toenail fungus that won't go away no matter what you do, that makes your toenails so yellow and unsightly that you are ashamed to be seen barefoot until you finally clear it up by taking Natren Healthy Trinity Probiotics 90 Capsules Dairy Free.

Hey, if he can get away with it....

What I cannot deny, though, is that the book got better and better as it careened along. I started out giving it 3 stars, gradually raised it to 4, and then VERY grudgingly raised it 5 as he actually pulled off a pretty spectacular ending.

Unfortunately, since this is the first book in a series: M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales, I guess that means I shall now be forced to read The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen and Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware.

I can hardly wait!

I read this aloud to my kiddos (ages 11, 8, and 5). We laughed until we cried, literally. I've recommended it to all of my friends with kids. It's just huge fun. It was tough deciding what to follow it with, it was that good. (We decided on the Percy Jackson series.)

My kids and I listened to this book on CD while on a trip. I had to talk my 16-year-old son into it, as he was convinced he would not like it. We all loved it. The reader was great, but the book itself was brilliant. Great pace, great characters, smart humor. You won't be disappointed.

Took me back to my childhood of Saturday Sci-Fi movies like "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" & watching "Get Smart." Excellent read!

This is a brilliant satire of "Nancy Drew", "Tom Swift", and other children's series featuring plucky youngsters solving mysteries and being fodder for a series of books.

One of the characters, Katie Mulligan, is the star of the "Horror Hollow" series of books. (She just happens to live in a town named "Horror Hollow"). From about midway through this book, I'll quote the following :

Several men came in. They were thin and nervous.

"Miss Mulligan?" one said. "We'd like to find out a few details to use in an upcoming book."

" Oh no," said Katie. "It's the writers from Harcourt. They're here to find out what happened so they can write the next Horror Hollow book."