Big Bad Detective Agency. By
Bruce Hale. Scholastic. $4.99.
What if You Had Animal Feet!?
By Sandra Markle. Illustrated by Howard McWilliam. Scholastic. $4.99.
Batman: The Penguin’s Arctic
Adventure. By Donald Lemke. Illustrated by Jeremy Roberts. HarperFestival.
$3.99.
Batman: Winter Wasteland. By
Donald Lemke. Pictures by Steven E. Gordon. Colors by Eric A. Gordon. Harper.
$3.99.
Bruce Hale has a thing about
weird detectives, and so will anyone who stumbles upon Big Bad Detective Agency, which features Wolfgang the misunderstood
and unfairly accused wolf and his enthusiastic helper, Ferkel the tiny pig,
both of whom are on the trail of housebreakers in the kingdom of Fairylandia,
which is ruled by a prince rather than a king for reasons best known to the
rather choleric prince himself. Anyway, fans of Hale’s Chet Gecko series (Chet
is the fourth-grade lizard detective at Emerson Hicky Elementary School) will
welcome this new take on the detecting biz, which lacks some of Chet’s
wisecracks and nemeses but makes up for it by standing the whole Three Little
Pigs fairy-tale concept on its head (the little pigs here are hugely oversized
porkers, and nasty ones, to boot). Big
Bad Detective Agency features chapters “in which nobody is turned into a
newt,” “in which the world’s ugliest granny comes to call,” and in which there
are guest appearances by Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, and other favorites
from, well, Fairylandia, where “giants accidentally stepped on houses, and you
couldn’t get insurance to cover the damage. And don’t even get me started on
the magic goose poop.” Hale’s typically skewed sense of humor is hard at work
(or hard at play) here, with Wolfgang getting increasingly desperate to prove
that he was not the one who trashed
the pigs’ houses and should not
therefore be thrown into a dungeon forevermore and fed, yuck, porridge. The
twists and turns through which Wolfgang and his porky helper go in order to
pursue and eventually track down the culprit are amusing in Hale’s typically
ridiculous way, and the eventual solution – with everyone living more or less
happily more or less after – is both satisfying and the recipe for a sequel.
Which readers will no doubt eagerly await.
Animals take on a different
role, and for that matter so does fantasy, in a rather odd fact-based book
called What if You Had Animal Feet!?
Here, Sandra Markle and Howard McWilliam present things that make various
animals’ feet special, then show cartoon kids with those feet doing things that they could do if they actually had
those feet, which of course they don’t. A housefly’s feet have tiny claws for
gripping, for example, so the fly can stick anywhere, even upside down – and a
basketball-playing kid with fly feet “could run up the wall and across the
ceiling to drop the ball through the hoop.” A green basilisk lizard’s back feet
“have long toes fringed with skin,” which spreads out when the lizard slaps its
foot on water – allowing the lizard to run on top of the water for at least 15
feet; so a kid with these feet “wouldn’t need a bridge to cross a stream.” A
duck-billed platypus has feet with skin connecting the toes, which are “perfect
swimming flippers,” plus (in the males) back feet with spur-like nails that can
inject venom, so a kid with those feet would be “a fast-swimming superhero with
a built-in weapon.” There are 11 creatures’ feet discussed in all – including,
among others, those of the aardvark,
cheetah, and giant African millipede – and then matters get serious (and, to
tell the truth, less interesting) with a discussion of human feet and how kids
can take good care of them. Well, there probably had to be some sort of
educational orientation here, beyond the descriptive material about animals and
their appendages, and the concluding “keep your feet healthy” section is
harmless enough and actually contains reasonable advice. The real attraction of
the book, though, lies in the fanciful notion of kids with decidedly non-human
feet – and in drawings that manage to make the use of such feet look like a
tremendous amount of fun.
The fun is more limited in
two new (+++) books featuring the redoubtable comic-book superhero, Batman, who
is nowadays shown with a craggier and generally angrier look than he used to
have as he battles villains who seem far more incompetent than they really
ought to be. Kids who are fans of the modern incarnation of Batman will briefly
enjoy these books, which are super-simply written and instantly forgettable
once read. The Penguin’s Arctic Adventure
involves disappearing businessmen, courtesy of the human Penguin, who hatches a
nefarious scheme (of course) that draws in both Batman and his equally craggy
sidekick, Robin (whose mask appears to stay put by magic and who seems to have
no eyeballs). The slight story pits B&R against “the evil sorceress Circe,”
who really does do magic – which is countered when Batman gets some help from
Zatanna, who is able to rescue the Dynamic Duo but cannot figure out what to do
next (a rather sexist story twist, if anyone happens to notice), so she has to
follow the guys’ lead. Winter Wasteland
is a Level 2 book in the “I Can Read!” series (this level consists of
“high-interest stories for developing readers”), and it includes not only
Batman (without Robin) but also the Flash and Wonder Woman. The three team up
to stop “a group of frosty felons” called the Ice Pack. The baddies, Captain
Cold, Mr. Freeze, and Killer Frost, are using weapons to make everything, like,
really cold and frozen, for no apparent reason other than mischief-making – but
hey, after all, they are baddies, so
the goodies get together and stop them. These Batman-based books are very
thinly plotted and clearly intended only as very quick reads requiring little
attention and no real involvement with the characters. As fantasies, they fall
short, but for providing a modicum of short-term excitement to existing Batman
fans, they do have a niche to fill.
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