MILES AND JONES #1

An improbable evil overtakes a neighborhood park.

Best friends Shackleton Jones and Amelia Miles are eagerly anticipating their first sleepover. While headed to Amelia’s place to pick her up, Shackleton and his dad encounter a neighbor in the park bemoaning their (absolutely average) noise level. In a stroke of silly foreshadowing, Shackleton notes that she’ll return in Chapter 12. Arriving at the Mileses’ abode, they discover that Amelia’s mom has overloaded her daughter’s backpack with an “inhaler, a book on how to survive in the wild, an air mattress, a night-light,” and more. The bag is so heavy that Amelia’s mom opts to carry it back to the Joneses’—but a massive rainstorm leaves the crew stranded mid-park, where they employ Amelia’s air mattress as a boat. If this weren’t fiasco enough, an enormous anaconda (and, eventually, its parents!) emerges from the deluge, and the kids must use their fledgling shoe-tying abilities to tie the snakes in knots. Shortly thereafter, the cranky neighbor, now transformed into villainous “Glam-Evil,” arrives to announce she’s placed a magical curse upon the park. Smith and Lador have crafted a playful, unpretentious adventure, quick to break the fourth wall for a laugh. The illustrations aptly capture characters’ personalities with quirky body shapes and funny facial expressions, but the initially well-established setting seems to get washed away as the floodwaters rise. Shackleton is pale-skinned and bespectacled; Amelia is brown-skinned.

A lighthearted and accessible bit of metafiction.