Fly Guy #14: Fly Guy’s Amazing
Tricks. By Tedd Arnold. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $6.99.
There Was an Old Lady Who
Swallowed a Fly! By Lucille Colandro. Illustrated by Jared Lee. Cartwheel
Books/Scholastic. $6.99.
The Zombie Chasers #5: Nothing
Left to Ooze. By John Kloepfer. Illustrated by David DeGrand. Harper.
$16.99.
Galaxy’s Most Wanted #1. By
John Kloepfer. Illustrated by Nick Edwards. Harper. $12.99.
Some series are so reliable
that parents can buy them for children without even pre-reading the new entries.
Tedd Arnold’s Fly Guy books are an
example. These easy-to-read adventures always start by explaining about Fly
Guy’s ability to say the name of the boy who keeps him as a pet, Buzz – and
then moving into a short and amusing story of boy and fly doing things
together. In Fly Guy’s Amazing Tricks,
Buzz shows friends how Fly Guy can do the backstroke in any liquid, fly around
swiftly and confusingly in the “Dizzy Doozie,” and perch beneath Buzz’s nose as
“the Big Booger.” All is fine with the other kids, but when Fly Guy shows the
same tricks to Buzz’s parents during a family meal, Buzz realizes some control
is needed. So he tells Fly Guy only to do tricks after hearing the word NOW.
Then, wouldn’t you know it, Buzz and Fly Guy encounter a neighborhood bully,
who insults Buzz (mildly); Buzz tries to ignore him; but the kid gets angry and
orders Buzz to answer him NOW. And so Fly Guy goes into action, confusing the
bully so much with the tricks that he bumps into a garbage can and is chased
away by “a zillion angry flies.” A typically silly and true-to-its-characters
series entry, Fly Guy’s Amazing Tricks
will be fun for anyone who already enjoys these offbeat little books.
Fans of Lucille Colandro’s
many variations on the old rhyme about the old lady who swallowed a fly (and
lots of other things) will also have plenty of fun with that series’ newest
entry – which is really where things should have started, since this one uses
the original rhyming story. But it does not use it in quite as fatal a way as
the original, which constantly repeats the line, “Perhaps she’ll die,” and ends
with the old lady swallowing a horse, after which “she’s dead, of course.” None
of that here – these variations are strictly for humor, and although not all
the books in this sequence are rhymed or plotted successfully, this one is.
Here the refrain is “She won’t say why,” and nobody dies – not even the fly,
spider, bird, cat, dog, goat or cow swallowed by the always-smiling old lady
and landing in her capacious stomach. At the end, the old lady simply coughs
everyone up, and everybody becomes friends with everybody else – a thoroughly
silly conclusion that is right in line with Colandro’s usual handling of these
books and that, thanks to Jared Lee’s typically enjoyable illustrations, makes
the whole thoroughly implausible tale as amusing as it can be.
Parents may want to pre-read John Kloepfer’s series for slightly older
readers, ages 8-12, to be sure they are comfortable with the grossness level –
which, however, they can be pretty sure will not bother many kids in the target
age group at all. The original trilogy of The
Zombie Chasers has now expanded into a series of “re-zombification” books,
so there is now a fifth book in the overall series, with David DeGrand’s
illustrations ably taking over for the earlier ones of Steve Wolfhard. The plot
of the extended sequence is pretty much what you would expect: Zack and his
zombie-chasing team (Madison, Ozzie, Rice and Zoe) are hunting for a lasting antidote to the zombie virus,
their previous discovery having turned out to keep the bad bug at bay only
temporarily. In Nothing Left to Ooze
(bad puns are part and parcel of this series) they are searching for Madison’s
cousin, Olivia, which entails (among other things) traveling to the nation’s
best amusement park and dealing with such things as zombified vacationers. In a
typical scene, a Canadian Air Force pilot named Chet is zombie-bitten: “‘Hey,
man,’ Ozzie spoke to the delirious pilot as the zombie virus coursed through
his bloodstream. ‘You’re about to turn into a zombie. You have to take these.’
Ozzie gave him a small handful of ginkgo pills. ‘Will this keep me from turning
into a zombie?’ Chet asked. ‘Well, not really,’ said Ozzie. ‘But it’ll keep you
from turning us into zombies.’” And there are, of course, the usual narrow
escapes: “‘Hey, man, hurry up!’ Zack called to Ozzie as he limped quickly
toward the pull-down gate at the exit. ‘We gotta get outta here!’” A few super
zombies, popcorn/brain-flavored gumballs, Floridian freakazoids and “a dense
pack of undead brain-gobblers” later, the Zombie Chasers realize they have to
get off the mainland to figure things out, thereby setting the scene for the
next book in the series, which will be called – no kidding – Zombies of the Caribbean.
Meanwhile, back at the
origin of series like this, Kloepfer is starting Galaxy’s Most Wanted in a similar vein – this time with
illustrations by Nick Edwards. The preteen group here includes Kevin and his
science-camp friends, Tara, TJ and Warner. Together they make contact with
actual alien life and get to meet an actual alien named Mim, who is cute and
purple and fuzzy and four-eyed (literally
four-eyed; this has nothing to do with wearing eyeglasses). But Mim tells the
kids he is in trouble because of some galactic baddies who are after him, so
the Earth kids have to hide him (they have him put on a hoodie) and help him. Soon
enough, a pursuer shows up, yelling “‘Gluck-gluck-Mim-yim-yarkle’” and being as
scary as only a giant extraterrestrial insect can be. Mim explains that the
“space poachers” are after his entire species, “hunting us down and killing us
for our fur so they can make coats out of us. It can get really cold in outer
space.” So now the kids really need
to help Mim, and they do a pretty darned good job of it, too, until they begin
suspecting that maybe Mim is not telling them the whole truth, as in maybe not
even 1% of it – and soon there are issues involving positron force fields, a
“half-cyborg ET tracker,” a holographic rap sheet, a giant spider named Poobah,
and all sorts of other nonsensical goodies that will undoubtedly delight
preteen readers who are tired of earthbound zombies and looking for alternative
amusements. These Kloepfer series are easy to follow, easy to read,
plot-and-action driven (the characters are virtually identical), and packed
with just enough consistent fun so that both Nothing Left to Ooze and Galaxy’s
Most Wanted #1 get (+++) ratings. Some kids, however, will rate them higher
– ones who are thrilled by dialogue such as, “‘Umm, hey, nimrods… There’s kind
of more important stuff going on here than the Invention Convention. Like
saving the world.’”
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