Skip to main content

Lizard Music

By

by Daniel Pinkwater.
New York Review of Books, 2011. 157 pgs. Fiction.

When Victor's parents leave him with his older sister while they are on vacation, he worries about having to take care of her, but she soon leaves for the beach with her hippie friends leaving him on his own to sleep in, eat TV dinners, and stay up late to watch Walter Cronkite, Roger Mudd, and B movies. One night when all stations should have signed off, he sees a jazz ensemble of lizards playing really good music, but when he calls the station to find out who they are, they've never heard of such a thing. When Victor takes the bus into Hogboro he meets the Chicken Man, also known as Charles Swan, Lawrence Lawrence, and Herr Doktor Professor Horace Kupeckie, Plt. D. (Doctor of Poultry), who eventually takes him to the invisible island of the lizards, who are mostly named Reynold. Daniel Pinkwater is a loon of the highest order, and this reissue of one his early books a rare delight. Those of us who remember Walter Cronkite and Roger Mudd with fondness ("And that's the way it is" is Victor's mantra), will enjoy this book more than the whippersnappers for whom it is now newly available, but who could resist a kid who gets to stay home by himself eating pizza with anchovies and drinking grapes soda, and who gets to go on an adventure to the island of the lizards with Herr Doktor Professor and his really, really smart chicken?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If You Like...KPop Demon Hunters

By
KPop Demon Hunters has been one of the most talked-about movies of the summer. If you loved this movie as much as I did, you don't want the magic (or the music) to stop. Try reading these books that touch on some of the same topics and themes as the animated hit! Brick Dust and Bones By M. R. Fournet New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2023. Fiction. 247 pages. Orphaned Marius works in the family business--as their cemetery's ghost caretaker. However, Marius also moonlights as a monster hunter in order to earn the costly Mystic currency he needs to bring his mother back from the dead. As the window to bring his mother back begins to close, Marius's exploits get more and more dangerous, and he may have set his sights on a monster too big to handle on his own. Like Mira, Marius longs for familial connection, and his work as a monster hunter will satisfy the thrill of demon hunting for fans the movie. Where's Halmoni? By Julie J. Kim Seattle, WA: Little Bigfoot, 2017. Comics. W...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Kareem Between

By
  Kareem Between By Shifa Saltagi Safadi New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2024. Fiction. 324 pages.  Kareem loves football and as he gets ready to start seventh grade he dreams of someday becoming the first Syrian American NFL player. Seventh grade is not off to a great start for Kareem, after football tryouts don't go as he had planned, his best friend moves away, and his mom returns to Syria to help bring his sick grandfather to the US for treatment. So when Austin, the quarterback and coach's son, offers to talk to his dad and get Kareem on the football team in the spring, if he will cheat and do his homework for him, Kareem agrees. Kareem really wants to fit in at school and he is desperate to find a friend, but deep down he knows that doing Austin's homework isn't the right thing to do. And to make things harder, Kareem's mom asks him to be a friend to Fadi, a Syrian Christian refugee. He knows he should stand up for Fadi and help him adjust to the new school,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Memory Spinner

By
The Memory Spinner Written by C.M. Cornwell New York : Delacorte Press, 2025. Fiction. 281 pages. Fantasy is a genre that I don't often read. When I finish a good fantasy book, I always ask myself why I don't read more of them! This book made me ask myself that exact question. Lavender is a young girl who is struggling after the death of her mother. Her father doesn't like talking about the family's loss, and Lavender feels very alone in knowing how to grieve and cope with her feelings. Making the grieving process even harder for Lavender is the fact that she is struggling to hold on to memories of her mother.  The family runs an apothecary shop where Lavender is an apprentice. She has dreamed of her apprenticeship for a long time, putting in a lot of work to show her father she is a valuable asset. Unfortunately, while working side by side with her father, Lavender starts to notice that memories of her mother aren't the only thing she is having a hard time recallin...
Post a Comment
Read more