Customer Reviews

The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There

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I sometimes forget what a great pleasure it is to read Daniel Pinkwater. I remember that I like him, and I remember why, but the sheer pleasure of taking in his words, his ideas, his flights of fancy... sometimes it's just hard to conjure that up. Because Pinkwater makes a kind of magic that is indefinable. He's an author who has made me cry buckets and laugh until I hurt myself. In fact, I don't think any other author has ever made me laugh harder.

Then along comes a new book, and once again, I sink into the delicious weirdness of Pinkwater's universe where a teenage girl's best friend is a ghost rabbit, and the specter of Teddy Roosevelt leads the annual ghost parade in Hollywood, drawing spectators such as a loosely caricatured Errol Flynn. It's a universe where a teenage boy saved the world one dark and stormy night, but he doesn't really recall the details, and thinks his mother might have tossed out the notebook where he wrote it all down when she threw out his comic books. It's a mad, wonderful mixture of the real and utterly off-the-wall fantasy, told in a dry, matter-of-fact voice which makes it all the funnier. There's no sly, sidelong winks, or any suggestion that the author even knows he's being amusing. Just a spiffy little narrative in which anything could and probably will happen and no one will think anything of it. In fact, they'll probably just shrug and go out for a doughnut and coffee afterward.

I don't want to say too much about the plot because letting it unfold is half the fun. Suffice to say that I recommend this book highly, as I do anything by Daniel Pinkwater. The man is brilliant.

What you have to understand about Daniel Pinkwater is that he pretty much does whatever he wants while writing. This means that he tends to ramble a bit and go off in strange little directions. However, a lot of the time this is as much a strength as a weakness; Pinkwater has FUN, and you can't help having fun with him.

The Yggyssey, starring Iggy (Yggdrasil) Birnbaum, is a sequel to the Neddiad, which starred Neddy Wentworthstein. It's a good idea to read the Neddiad first, but it's not strictly necessary. Iggy lives in a once-grand hotel in Hollywood. She is the daughter of a silent movie star-turned-talking movie star, so even though he's rather old and she's very young, you understand that these books are set some four or five decades ago, when kids could apparently hang out with old cowboy stars on the streets of Hollywood and not get into trouble.

Part of Pinkwater's approach is to randomly satirize things, by the way. For example, Iggy goes to a progressive school called Harmonious Reality, where the "teachers are polite, and the kids, while confused and illiterate, are mostly friendly." Iggy's mother is a psychiatrist to the stars. Iggy summarizes her mother's approach to child-raising thusly: "She thinks stress is worse than the Black Plague or a herd of stampeding bull elephants. I am strictly forbidden to be frustrated, repressed, or restrained. This can be annoying. Sometimes you want to be frustrated, repressed, or restrained. Of course, I am also strictly forbidden to be annoyed."

A lot of the plot of The Yggyssey revolves around ghosts. Iggy knows quite a few ghosts, since the hotel she lives in is a popular hangout for phantoms. In fact, she has to kick them out of her bedroom on occasion. Then she notices that the ghosts' numbers have been thinning, and she wonders why. One of her best friends, a ghostly black rabbit, eventually leads her down a rabbit hole into an alternate universe, where Iggy plans to catch up with the missing ghosts. She manages to bring her buddies Neddie and Seamus along, and together they have adventures involving noxious TV ads, hippies (or rather "hoopies"), pissed-off witches, and millions of cats. Pinkwater gets a little carried away with children's literature allusions at this point, but it's all entertainingly surreal and goofy.

A friend and I figured out that Pinkwater's characters tend to say things that real people don't say--but should. His characters don't use as many contractions as real people, either, which often adds a strange tinge of formality to the otherwise casual dialogue. All of this simply contributes to the unique verbal stylings of Daniel Pinkwater (who is also a popular NPR commentator, FYI). Pinkwaterian isn't an adjective, but it could be, and it would have a very specific meaning.

Now, I'll warn you that the plot of The Yggyssey doesn't hang together well in comparison to The Neddiad; the ending is especially undercooked. However--and I say this with great earnestness--the book is so weirdly funny along the way that you may find it's worth overlooking irrelevant considerations such as narrative logic. After all, I'm guessing there's a reason one of the tags Amazon suggested for this book was "dada."

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.

If you like The X-Files: The Complete Collector's Edition or Fringe: The Complete Second Season, but you like humor more than terror, this is a book for you! Yggdrasil Birnbaum lives in the Hermione, a residential hotel, and is friendly with the ghosts who live there. She goes to the Harmonious Reality School, where the philosophy is to spare children any kind of stress. But Iggy, as she's called, is fully up for adventure (unlike her dopey classmates), so when some of the ghost notables disappear (so to speak), she and her friends Neddie and Seamus are off on the kind of ridiculous and improbable adventure that comes only from the cruller-fueled imagination of Daniel Pinkwater.

While lacking the epic scope of the previous book, The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization, in favor of a series of fairy tale adventures, readers will not be disappointed. This book is sillier and more random than its predecessor, to jolly effect. You just never know what Daniel, or D. Manus, or whatever he's calling himself these days, will come up with -- from girls with cat whiskers to urban mountaineers to a consumerist brainwashing prison for children called Juvenile Hole, with a dramatic rescue from said Hole with the judicious application of the sticky dessert Shoofly Pie.

Mr. Pinkwater has unlimited imagination, with a refreshing rebel streak that refuses to satisfy reader expectations if there's a better laugh to be had by thwarting them. There's a parallel world waiting, starting in New Yapyap City, continuing as we warn our band of world-hoppers, "Don't go into the gingerbread house! It will not go well for you, and you might piss off a witch!"

The only thing is, whether it's Neddie from The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization, or Iggy in The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There, all the heroes and heroines are clearly the Alpha Hero, Uncle Father Palabra -- Mr. Pinkwater himself -- taking himself and his loyal reader sidekicks on the adventures he enjoys.

I got this for my 12 year old who has only become a big reader within about the last two years. She is very picky and we go through a lot of books in the process of finding ones she likes. This is one that she liked.

It might seem impossible to write a review of a Daniel Pinkwater novel without using the words "zany," "quirky," "eccentric" or just plain "weird." But I'm going to give it a shot, even though Pinkwater's latest book --- like many in his beloved body of work --- could be accurately described by any of the above.

It's a follow-up (of sorts) to his 2007 novel THE NEDDIAD, this time focusing on Neddie's friend and neighbor, Yggdrasil (Iggy) Birnbaum. Unlike Neddie Wentworthstein and Seamus Finn, her best friends, Iggy doesn't go to Brown-Sparrow Military Academy. Quite the contrary; she attends Harmonious Reality School, where avocados are revered for their anti-stress properties and where "you can major in finger painting through sixth grade." Not surprisingly, school doesn't give Iggy's brain much of a challenge; instead, she enjoys spending time with the numerous ghosts that populate the Hollywood hotel, the Hermione, where she and her parents live.

Almost without her noticing it (they are always kind of invisible, after all), the ghosts --- from the prehistoric ghost of a woman found in the La Brea tar pits to the extremely vain ghost of silent movie star Rudolph Valentino --- are disappearing. When even Iggy's special friend, the frequently morphing bunny ghost Chase, makes a run for it, Iggy, Neddie and Seamus follow her to Old New Hackensack, a gathering place in another plane of existence for specters and spirits from our world.

As they travel through this parallel universe, they find places that might seem familiar to readers, but are strange and frightening to these 1950s-era kids, such as New Yapyap City: "Our schools are no good, kids aren't allowed to use the better parks, we feed them junky breakfast cereal that's full of sugar, sell their parents a lot of defective toys and expensive clothing, and give them stupid books to read, and stupid television programs, and throw them into Juvenile Hole for any reason at all, or no reason." Finally, Iggy's journey culminates in a supernatural showdown with someone with whom she might share a surprising connection.

THE YGGYSSEY is full of delights, even for kids who didn't read about Iggy and her friends in THE NEDDIAD. There's Pinkwater's playfully sentimental depiction of the innocence of an earlier time: "I had heard of pizza pie because of `That's Amore,' the Dean Martin song, which was on the radio all the time, but I didn't actually know what it was.... I always pictured the pizza pie as being something like a cream pie. It's round, but it does not resemble any pie I ever saw --- it's not a dessert, it does not contain fruit, it does not have a top crust and a bottom crust.... It's served hot. It tastes great! It is, without any doubt, the greatest food ever invented, and I predict it is going to be insanely popular." Or there are the myriad literary references to such classics as ALICE IN WONDERLAND, "Hansel and Gretel," THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS and THE WIZARD OF OZ("Shmenda, the good witch of the Northeast... Extremely good witch. So good, she's boring. But good.").

What's most enjoyable about Pinkwater's novels is the fun he seems to have creating them, ensuring that readers will gleefully go along for the ride.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

I've loved Daniel Pinkwater's books since I was a kid. He cleverly unites the abserd with the commonality of growing up and throws in a bunch of pop culture refs that generally only adults (and the kids rereading the books as adults) will get, without it feeling forced.

I would definitely recommend reading The Neddiad first before reading The Yggyssey. There is very little introduction of characters (only new ones)as this is a sequel and he expects you remember everyone from the last book. Now I'm just waiting for the man with the chicken on his head to show up in the next book in the series.

I have been a Daniel Pinkwater fan since hearing him on PBS and discovering one of his kids' books, The Big Orange Splot. I have a grown son with severe autism and he likes adventure stories. Currently, I think a lot of people confuse adventure with gruesome occurrences, horrifying situations, disgusting events, etc. Not so, Mr. Pinkwater! We had such a good time with Iggy on her oddessey. We anticipated, we were scared, we were surprised, we were excited, relieved and happy. This man does not write down to people; he pours on the challenging vocabulary as though he's talking to an intelligent person. He obviously loves language and encourages the same. We had such a good time that we backed up and read The Neddiad, too! Keep them coming, Daniel!

I made sure to read the Neddiad before I jumped into Yggyssey. I found Neddiad to be whimsical and amusing but I'm afraid the charm wore off for me by the time I got to Yggyssey. I also sort of struggled to keep picking it up to finish reading. The book isn't bad, it's even amusing at points, it has whimsy, but it just lacked luster for me. I felt I was being slowly drug through a journey of watching kids eat, think about stuff and doing stuff.

Sorry, it didn't do it for me. The very beginning of the story was fun with the ghosts coming in and out of Iggy's, but when Iggy started wondering what happended to all the ghosts I did too, they were my fun part.

My niece loved it at age 10, and then I started to read it and couldn't put it down. Great read.