[Book Reviews] ‘The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death’ by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

"The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death" by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

NOTE: Today’s book is also available as a free audiobook download that’s read by the author himself. It’s really funny. Get it here.

Daniel Manus Pinkwater (a.k.a. D.M. Pinkwater or Daniel Pinkwater — he likes to change it up to confuse librarians) is a fantastic writer. He’s also a fantastic storyteller. But where I mean the first use of “fantastic” as an adjective describing the QUALITY of his work, I mean the second use as an adjective describing the STYLE of his work. More than anyone I’ve ever read, Pinkwater is able to take fairly normal people and propel them into the purest realms of fantasy. He’s not writing about knights and wizards and dragons, though he could be if he wanted to. But his works take the reader into places unknown, places that have a certain magical quality about them, and which seem to be built partially on memory and partially on dreams.

And maybe “dreamlike” is the best way to describe The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, because it begins as a simple story about a boy named Walter Galt who is bored with his high school. Walter is a misfit, an intelligent person among a bunch of dullards. His only friend is a similar misfit named Winston Bongo, the inventor of “snarking out” — sneaking out in the middle of the night, riding a bus into Baconburg and watching movies at an old theater called The Snark. Snarking out helps Walter manage the tedium of high school and the insanity of his family — his mother is a terrible cook who believes communists are lurking around every corner, and his father is obsessed with avocados.

Winston and Walter eventually befriend a girl they call “Rat,” and they discover that snarking out is something that many people do, including Rat’s uncle, Flipping Hades Terwilliger, who never misses a show. But when Uncle Flipping goes missing (something he’s prone to do), the boys put their snarkout plans to the side and go on a quest to travel through the underworld of Baconburg (not necessarily a seedy place, but rather, a literal street underneath a street) searching for Uncle Flipping… and find themselves tangled up in an international criminal caper that revolves around a specially-bred avocado that can think like a computer.

OK, so the book’s a little bit weird. But it’s a good kind of weird, and well-written. It’s an adventure into places that no other writer will ever take you, with characters who could only exist in a Pinkwater book. There’s a sense of nostalgia to the book, a longing for old things and simple pleasures. The sequel, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, is also quite good, and though it’s a little more aware of how weird it is, it’s also worth a read. (As a child, I read the sequel first, and thus preferred it, but many people feel that the original is the better of the two books.)

Though this is a book you’d find the Young Adult section, it’s a great light read, for three reasons:

1) It’s unique. I don’t use that word often, but it applies here. I’ve never read a book like it.
2) It’s never boring. Even though the book starts to get a little farcical towards the end, it still moves along at a brisk clip, and the ebb and flow of characters makes for interesting reading.
3) It doesn’t talk down to its audience. Part of the reason I can read this book as an adult and enjoy it so much is because it’s written for an intelligent audience. Pinkwater never talks down to kids, even in his picture books. That’s one of the reasons I liked them so much as a kid; they didn’t demean me.

If I have one complaint about this book, it’s that the story turns into a mystery two thirds of the way in that is not developed or compelling. The Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson-esque characters, while amusing, wear on you after awhile because they have everything figured out already and take dozens of pages to fill in all the backstory. You also feel no real satisfaction at seeing the master criminal, Wallace Nussbaum, brought to justice at the end because he never threatens the characters in any way.

This is a great collection, and well worth owning.

But don’t let that dissuade you from reading it. It’s fantastic, and you can buy it in a collection with four other great books:

• Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars
• Slaves of Spiegel
• The Last Guru
• Young Adult Novel

Give it a try. If you like the weird, you won’t be disappointed.

GENRE: Magical Realism / Fantasy
STORY: *** 1/2
CHARACTERS: ****
CONCEPT: ****
RE-READABILITY: ****

[Television Thursday] – Five Great TV Shows You’ve Likely Never Heard of (But Should Track Down on DVD!)

If you’re reading my blog as of late and thinking to yourself, “Man, all Sean does is watch TV, play games, and complain about movies,” If you think that, I don’t blame you — I don’t know how I’ve come to acquire so much knowledge about so many trivial topics, but here we are. As a writer and a creative artist, I’ve always been interested in consuming entertainment media, and as a critic and a thinker, I’ve always been interested in thinking through their aesthetics and implications. That’s what I get for being such a “middle-brained” person.

As it happens, I don’t watch a lot of television anymore, because most of it is garbage. But over the last few years, with seasons of shows popping up on DVD, I’ve found myself watching a lot of television shows. Part of the appeal of watching shows is that they’re just about the right length (20-40 minutes) for me to watch while I’m eating or resting, and they don’t require me to sink the time I’d put into, say, a feature film. TV shows are also typically less demanding in terms of my attention; as long as I know the characters and the premise, I don’t have to have much more information, unless I’m watching a serialized show like Lost or Heroes.

One of the things I’ve found out in recent years is that many of the best shows produced for TV are fairly obscure titles that were either cancelled prematurely or aired on networks most people don’t watch regularly. So, I thought I’d put together a list of five really solid shows, all of which are available on DVD, but most of which you’ve probably never heard of. All I ask is that you do the right thing and buy them on DVD if they’re available, and reserve searching bittorent sites for those which are out of print or not yet available on DVD in your country.

With that said, here’s the list!

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