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BIXXY AND THE SECRET MESSAGE by Louis Slobodkin

BIXXY AND THE SECRET MESSAGE

By

Pub Date: Oct. 11th, 1949
Publisher: Macmillan

I'd be inclined to sell this as a cub scout story first- a carrier pigeon story second, though the designation would be the other way round. For Bixxy is a carrier pigeon, whose job it is to carry messages back and forth from New Jersey to Long Island for the U. S. Army. Sometimes they were important messages. And Bixxy had a habit that once proved nearly fatal,- he would let himself get side-tracked, forget where he was headed, and have to go back and start over. And- too- he liked to walk as a change from flying, and this, too, got him into trouble (besides delaying him). In this particular incident, around which Slobodkin has built his story, Bixxy is rescued from a tar bath in N. Y. C. by a cub scout, and becomes the scouts' problem. They make some wrong decisions, but eventually it comes out right, and the story would provide entertainment for a group on a rainy afternoon. There's a good deal of Slobodkin's somewhat pompous humor- and the pictures, which we've not seen, are sure to be charming, though they are to be in black and white, not in the colors one associates with him.