LIZARD MUSIC

by D. Manus Pinkwater ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1976

Lizard Music is that rarity, a children's fantasy that is truly contemporary in sensibility as well as setting. It's funny, properly paranoid, shot through with bad puns and sweet absurdities, and all about a baffled kid intent on tracking reality (as slippery as lizards) in a media-spooked milieu. Television figures here as prominently as it does in most kids' lives--or as comics did in Wingman (1975). It's on late night TV that Victor, eleven, first sees the movie about pods invading the earth and replacing their human doubles. . . and then sees what he is sure are pod people on a talk show. Differently scary, it's on unlisted late late TV that he first sees the lizard band whose music he likes ""more than anything I'd ever heard."" After that ""all of a sudden I was running into lizards every five minutes""--possibly peeping over Roger Mudd's shoulder on the late news (Victor can't be sure), certainly featured on a ""legitimate"" animal show, and, off TV, on an old record jacket, a realistic poster, the zoo bus, and weirdest of all, alive in the hand of the strange, bony-fingered old black ""chicken man"" he meets on another bus with a performing chicken named Claudia. All of a sudden the chicken man, too, starts turning up everywhere, on and off TV, under a variety of aliases; he seems to have some answers--not only about lizards (they're from ""other space"") but also about pods (they're not--merely ""ordinary people who have developed in a certain way. There's a lot of it going around""); and, though he's not at all straight about telling what he knows, he finally takes Victor to an invisible floating island, inhabited by hospitable, harmonious lizards, where Claudia hatches the egg that lizard legend says will grow to lead them in conquering the pods. Which is certainly a more significant feat, and far less pretentiously brought forth, than are any of those traditionalist victories of light over darkness that are still being (over) sold as high fantasy.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1976

ISBN: 1590173872

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dodd, Mead

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: FICTION