Disposable Lit Reviews

Harcourt, 2005
180 pp.
ISBN 0-15-205340-9

Buy it from Amazon.com
or eBay or Half.com

It came well-recommended, but that’s not a slam-dunk; Chris is one of those Bollywood people, so you know his tastes are a little off-kilter. Then I read the first line:

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.

There were only two ways the book could go from here. It could spiral down into The Suck so fast your ears would pop, or it could turn out to be One Of The Best Books Ever Written Ever.

Then plan for ruling the earth revolves around whales attacking the land on stilts. With laser-beam eyes.

Which makes it official. One Of The Best Books Ever Written Ever.

The stupid adults are, of course, stupid. Lily’s dad never stops to wonder why his job takes place in an abandoned warehouse, or why his boss Larry wears a burlap sack over his head and soaks himself with buckets of brine regularly. But Lily has other resources: Her best friend Katie has led such an exciting life in the Horror Hollow subdivision that there’s been a series of Goosebumps-like books written about her. Her other best friend Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, has also had a series of books written about him, though they’re out of print and largely forgotten. (Jasper is to Tom Swift, Jr. what Tom Swift, Jr. is to Danny Dunn.) Both series have large ads in Whales on Stilts!, by the way. With checklists and everything. But this is not their story. This is Lily’s story, and she’s the one who figures out how to fight the whales before they can stomp their way clear over to Decentville, and beyond to the state capitol.

These upfront gimmicks might seem sufficient for a witty book. But there’s so much wit here that I despair of ever appearing witty in my own eyes again. Each page as some sort of extra funny, not so much that the book seems overstuffed, but enough to let you know that M.T. Anderson isn’t simply coasting on the brilliant idea of whales with laser-beam eyes on stilts. There are typographic sight gags, attention-deficit asides, and the occasional footnote that goes on for a half-dozen pages until you forget what they were originally about. And there is a priceless post-story section, skewering brilliantly the kind of “further study” material that threatens to suck the fun out of too many young-adult books by turning them into something edifying.

I’ve never had so much outright fun reading a book that didn’t involve speech balloons. Buy it. Now.