Junior Edition #14

Kate DiCamillo provides several tip-offs that, in her rootin’-tootin’ Leroy Ninker Saddles Up, her daffy, soulful and surprisingly spunky squirt of a protagonist lives somewhere you can’t just up and travel to, and that’s the past. Leroy works the concession stand at a drive-in movie theater. The family cars parked there would be vintage today. Moreover, though a grownup, he says “Yippie-i-oh” a lot, which you don’t hear much anymore. (In her trademark zippy way, Newbery medalist DiCamillo also coins some droll, cheerful, innocent-sounding expressions exclusive to Leroy that come in handy for letting him largely suppress the scarily different person he used to be, with a past of his own to hide.) Quaintest of all, he dreams of owning Western boots, a twirling lasso, and a ten-gallon hat: he wants to be a cowboy. That he longs to be “never ever afraid,” like the Marlboro men he worships on screen says more about Leroy than them.

After all, there’s little purpose to exciting dreams and aspirations unless they’re acted upon. Sometimes friends have to prod a dreamer from fantasy into reality. Here it’s his co-worker Beatrice Leapaleoni, who, like the rest of the book’s illustrated characters, sports goofy yet endearing features. But she also has common sense: Leroy needs a horse.

With a determination that should teach young readers a thing or two, Leroy scours newspaper ads for that very thing, and once he finds it, provides such pointers as repeating the printed address twice, safekeeping it in his pocket, and grabbing “fate” by the tail. Her name is Maybelline, a stubborn old steed that, like most animal versions of humanity, has her quirks—1) she responds only to compliments 2) has a prodigious appetite, and 3) hates to be alone. The first makes a poet out of Leroy, the second a short-order spaghetti cook, and the third presents the conundrum of how to fit Maybelline into Leroy’s apartment so she doesn’t have to be alone—which he can’t. The solutions he arrives at, and how adaptability and growing mutual affection bring the pair even more friends—including the African-American siblings Maybelline bonds with when she briefly runs away—are funny and heart-warming, while also opening the shy floodgates that enable Leroy to confess his past sins to the understanding Maybelline. He’s a good way toward his goal of equaling his idealized cowboys. It’s a catharsis on the order of the epics he and Maybelline watch, together, on the drive-in movie’s screen. But stasis can hardly set in for these two—Leroy Saddles Up is only the first in a new Kate DiCamillo series.

There’s scads of territory where fans of Carl Hiaasen’s gonzo detective fiction might expect to find his occasional character Skink (given name, Clint Tyree)—college football star, crusading ex-governor of Florida downed by corruption, eccentric, bibliophile, as odd in attire and demeanor as in huger-than-life personality, nature lover in a shower cap with a fine collection of artificial eyes he pops in and out of an empty socket, funny as a dancing alligator in the disappearing swamps he holds dear, old in years, crazy young in spirit, and smart as all get-out.  But they may not have guessed that Skink would turn up in a book for young readers.

Yet that’s just what Skink—No Surrender does. It’s a first for Hiaasen, and a yarn for our times.  He hooks up with a teenager, Richard (who narrates the story but adolescent-like, divulges no last name) a beach-combing, alienated kid still mourning his father’s death, close to no one (certainly not his Mountain Dew guzzling stepfather) except his cousin Malley, who’s even more bored by their suburban background than he is, and more rebellious. She’s the type to suddenly disappear, this time ostensibly to get out of being shipped off to boarding school, but more likely kidnapped by a weasly character she met in an online chat room.

That’s the Internet as a tricky, villainous fact of modern life; more benign are the cell phones through which Richard and Malley are finally able to communicate, Malley conveying clues that only Richard understands, which point to a hiding place way up the Panhandle on a decrepit houseboat, Malley handcuffed by the “creep” she first thought was a cool DJ.

It doesn’t help Richard and Skink in the subsequent pursuit of the bad guy, that dead people turn out to be alive, and living ones, dead. A funny off-shoot is the temporarily crippled Skink, teaching Richard to drive, propped on one of his thicker books, Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It’s known that many oddballs populate the social fringes of Florida culture—and, with that, Hiaasen’s fiction. Skink—No Surrender turns one of his grandest nonconformists into a boy’s dream companion—and Richard learns to wake Skink from his moaning nightmares of Vietnam.  Thoreau knocks on our memories, but also Hunter S. Thompson.

In Skink—No Surrender it takes dozens of cops to mess up royally, and a one-eyed outcast and his creator to perceive goodness, generosity, growing up and an alert peace of mind deep down and far ahead. Wherever there’s an open road and a mystery to be solved, Hiaasen’s high opinions of freedom and orneriness are on it. He doesn’t speak down to his new audience, and he also doesn’t sugar coat the America in which it’s coming of age. The future is for the young to figure out. Only some are lucky enough to run into a guiding light who has lasted long enough to help them.