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ADVENTURES OF A CAT-WHISKERED GIRL by Daniel Pinkwater

ADVENTURES OF A CAT-WHISKERED GIRL

by Daniel Pinkwater

Pub Date: June 1st, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-22324-7
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Pinkwater shifts locales from Hollywood to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for this not-exactly-a-sequel to The Yggyssey (2009), but he continues to festoon his newest determinedly errant plot with thinly disguised literary and cultural references. Considering herself just an ordinary girl who happens to have cat eyes and whiskers, Big Audrey fetches up in a town where aliens land behind a certain barn/café for apple fritters on Wednesdays, a mansion built by a colonial “patroon spittoon tycoon” behaves skittishly and strange but somehow familiar figures like a scary Muffin Man and recognizable Wild Things (“Hudson River trolls”) wander through. Naturally (naturally!), a quest ensues to track down a terrifying spirit dubbed the Wolluf and to discover the connection between Big Audrey and a seemingly identical 19th-century lass who vanished suddenly. Well stocked with the usual oddball characters and fabulous throwaway lines (“Doughnuts are not unknown where I come from, but they are not used as food”), the book sails along in an airy and vastly entertaining way to an appropriately daffy resolution. Pinkwater is definitely on a roll—or in this case a fritter. (Fantasy. 11-13)