Jules, Penny & the Rooster is his brand-new middle-grade fantasy novel, published today in paperback and electronic formats. It is actually a bit less Pinkwaterian than some of his most recent books, which may be good for newer or younger readers - a lot of his work for the past two decades has been set in a vague shared world and/or involved what I thought were semi-autobiographic elements from his own childhood, quite some time ago. (As you might guess from the fact that I first read Pinkwater almost fifty years ago, he's somewhat older than I am, and I am not young.)
This one is more straightforward, though told in Pinkwater's usual fun zippy prose and with the random background details we Pinkwater fans love. (For example, our heroine tells us in the first chapter that her "father has an excellent job in the deluxe shoelace industry, and my mother is a house plant psychiatrist." And that's not a throwaway; we do get glimpses of her mother psychoanalyzing various neurotic plants and her dad's commute to the Shoelace Institute.) It's told in first person by Jules McShultz, a middle-schooler whose family just moved out to the new suburb Bayberry Acres for their first big new house, at the beginning of this one summer.
Jules has wanted a dog since she was tiny, and her parents told her that couldn't happen until they had a house, and now they have a house, so...there's still no dog. Jules enters a contest by writing into the local newspaper, hoping to win a purebred collie, and of course - that's the plot of the book - she does.
She names the dog Penny, her parents don't quite actually say they're keeping the dog but keep saying "we'll see" while getting a leash and food and other doggie accouterments, and Jules starts taking Penny for long walks in the undeveloped woods just past the end of Bayberry Acres.
(The book doesn't say when it's set, and, like a lot of Pinkwater, it could as easily be now as fifty or seventy years ago. The "still a lot of open wild land nearby as suburbs are being built" tends to argue for longer ago, but most young readers are not likely to pick up on that.)
The woods turn out to be enchanted, with several interesting denizens - including a friendly witch who went to high school with Jules's aunt - but a certain talisman that protects this forest from invasion by the normal world has recently been lost, and a prophesied trio of harbingers needs to retrieve the talisman and save the forest. And, yes, Jules and Penny are two of the three - the third being a rooster who they met when first entering the forest.
There are quirky Pinkwaterian characters along the way, with names like Vincent Arigato, Finnbar Hamentashen, and Rana Aullando - not to mention that Penny may be the reincarnation of a legendary wolf named Hakawakamaka - and similar odd Pinkwaterian situations. As usual with his work, there aren't villains as such, though one of the names above has done something damaging to the enchanted forest that needs to be corrected.
And, of course, there is a happy ending, as there has to be in a book like this. I wouldn't mind more stories of Jules and Penny, and Pinkwater leaves room for them to have more stories if he feels like it - but this one is definitely complete here.
No comments:
Post a Comment