I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new author...about 30 years later than I wish I had. Daniel Pinkwater has written, according to his website, about 100 books. He is also a contributor on NPR's All Things Considered. Which means I probably have heard him before, I just hadn't heard of him. And it's a shame.
I bought my 5th grade daughter The Neddiad the other day because simply it looked like a good book. And with the subtitle: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood and Saved Civilization, I was won over. It sounded like a good adventure any 5th grader could get into. She couldn't put it down. When I asked her to tell me about the story, she said that it was about a boy who gets a turtle and has to keep it safe and people were trying to get it from him. That sounded like an okay story. Although. She couldn't stop reading it and talked about it quite a bit (and told me that it was really hard to explain the story) and then wrote a letter to the author for a class project (hasn't sent it yet, I'll get back to you on that).
The next thing I knew she set it down on the kitchen counter one morning and was FINISHED. And, I thought to myself...maybe I should read this book, too; see what she liked, and try to get a grasp of what was so hard to explain about it. About 7 delightful hours later, broken up, of course, over two days (or the family would have complained mightily), I was done. One might think, like I did, that since the title is a dead ringer for the Iliad, that it might be a retelling of that monumental tale. But, really, it isn't. Instead, on one level (the level that perhaps a fifth grader might most easily understand), it IS the story of a young boy given a mysterious and courageous task and how he accomplishes it. Also, there are wacky characters, shamans, a ghost that joins in the story, even aliens...who could ask for more?
On another level (the one that I have been pondering in the five days since I finished the book), it is the classic story of good and evil. The story that transcends culture, time and place. Daniel Pinkwater basically took the mythical heros and demons of many cultures and threw them all in a pot, mixed them together and wove them all into a great book. Like the Saturday matinees the characters in the book so love to watch, Neddie's trip across America to the land of Hollywood (where new myths are recreated over and over again for the screen), Neddie is the good guy (and really a good kid) who unwittingly becomes a mythical force for good against the bad guy. The book is chock full of references to mythological figures of good and evil, which I have to think Pinkwater must have had a gigantically delightful time digging up to tuck into every corner of the book.
This is such a good, fun read. Read it with a kid you know (on Amazon, it is recommended for 5th-9th graders, and I agree), and enter Daniel Pinkwater's zany world together, it would be a thrilling ride. I am planning on reading The Yggyssey next, after, of course, my daughter reads it.
Check out http://www.pinkwater.com/ .
