I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DANNY WEINKAUF-“Archaeology” (2014).

Danny Weinkauf is one of the Band of Dans that plays with They Might Be Giants.  In 2014 he successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign to create his solo album, No School Today.  (I knew nothing about the Kickstarter campaign).

Danny also wrote “I am a Paleontologist” from They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science album, so his bona fides are good.  And the lyrics are clever and smart, too:

Archaeology It’s human evolution From the Caveman to you and me analyzing their solutions (yeah now)
/Archaeology the secrets they left for us We can study activities Of those who came before us

[READ: April 7, 2014] Stickman Odyssey, Book 1

While I was looking for Stickdog books for C., I came across Stickman.  There are two books in this series (with book two being set up for a third, but no sign of it yet).

This book is a kind of spoof of Homer’s Odyssey, but not really. It is set in the time of the ancient Greek gods and some of those gods make appearances.  Even the style is done in a generically Homeric epic storytelling style.  But none of the characters from Homer appear.  This is an alternate reality of sorts.  The Great Whirlpool exists (shades of Scylla and Charybdis), but so does Candy Island and a place called Odonoros and Stickman’s home world of Sticatha (which made me laugh once I pronounced it correctly).  So, you don’t need familiarity with Homer to appreciate this, indeed, it kind of confused me at first because I wasn’t sure if I should be looking for parallels.

Stickman’s name is the awkward Zozimos (which I want to be significant but can’t figure out any reason why it would be).

The gods do play with the humans, though.  On the second page we see that Athena wields a giant pen and makes Zozimos a raft while he is struggling in the ocean.  Days later he lands on what he thinks is Sticatha, but no, he lands on an island with fair maidens.  He tries to charm one of them, Asteria, but is immediately grabbed by a golem and dragged to jail.  The evil King Marnox imprisons every castaway who lands on the island–he has his reasons.

But Asteria is mad that her father is locking up all of these eligible men, so he brings Zozimos out of the jail for him to tell his story.  And it is…epic!

Zozimos’s father was king of Sticatha.  When his mother died, a witch came and married the king, becoming Zozimo’s stepmother.  She killed the king and turned all of the children into crows and they flew off.  Only Zozimos escaped with the help of his uncle Nestor.  (Nestor told him this history, by the way).  Nestor trained him to be a warrior and to seek revenge on her and reclaim Sticatha.  And Zozimos set out eventually landing on an island full of monsters (some familiar to ancient Greek stories).  He even battles the Sphinx.

He is saved by a woman named Alexa, who is a fierce warrior.  And together they march to a city where Zozimos imagines he can get a ship bound for Sticatha.  Of course he has no money (which means actually rowing the thing).  He also meets Praxis, the strongest man alive, although he’s not very smart.  The ship hit trouble and they were all tossed off the boat.  And that’s how he ended up on this island.

The king concludes that he is a short-sighted jerk who deserves what happened to him.  So he sets Zozimos on a quest of his own–to bring back a blood lily.  This takes up a large portion of the book and is very enjoyable–both because of the goat that tries to befriend him and the very strange-looking Atrukos whose identity is covered by a mask (the punchline of his identity is delivered in book two).  When the ghosts at the top of the mountain reveal a very funny truth about the blood lily, I laughed out loud.

Tables turn on our hero and people come and go until they reach candy island (which is also very funny).  It’s here that Zozimos runs into Praxis again (he proves to be a big part of Book 2), and a new enemy, a cyclops–Zozimos ha s great way of stopping the Cyclops.

The story ends with the culmination of a quest (or 2 or 3 or 4) and the promise of a next book–which proves to be a quest to help Praxis and Atrukos.

I found the ending to be a little confusing and a little unsatisfying.  But I enjoyed the bulk of the story so much that I was happy to read book two.

I decided that this book is a wee bit old for C. There’s a joke about “piss” which is the most mature thing in the book, but it just felt skewed to someone a little older (or someone with an older sibling who might be more familiar with some of the jokes).  It’s by no means for older kids, but I think maybe 10 or 11.