I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KEY WILD & MR. CLARKE-“Favorite Names” (2012).

This is a simple song (as kids songs should be).  But what appealed immediately was the big fuzzy guitar that introduces the song.  Lyrically it’s very simple: a list of the singer’s favorite names (all of which start with the letter J).  After repeating them twice, a voice asks about girls names, and we get a few J fronted  girls names.

The twist comes with the next verse when it is sung “en Espanol” and a new collection of Spanish names crop up (with the rest of the words in Spanish, too).  And then they switch the en Francais.  It’s multilingual!

I found out about Key Wild & Mr Clarke from WXPN, but I see that this song comes from an album that sounds awesome: Greasy Kids Stuff 3, a collection of songs from KNRK in Portland.  The collection sounds great and I’ll mention more songs from it this week.

[READ: July 31, 2014] Guinea Dog

I was unfamiliar with Patrick Jennings when I grabbed this book.  The title sounded intriguing, especially since we own guinea pigs.  Interestingly, after reading this book we read several other Patrick Jennings books, so this will be like Patrick Jennings week here at I Just Read About That.  I enjoyed reading this book to the kids, and they found it rather funny as well.

Guinea Dog is about a boy named Rufus. All he wants is a dog.  He would like a big, friendly, fast, funny dog.  Like the one his best friend has.  In fact, he would love his best friend’s dog.  The problem is that his father hates dogs. He hates them big time.  He has a list of reasons why he hates dogs and that list goes on for two pages (and it was fun to read aloud).

Rufus’ father is an anal retentive, stay at home annoyance (a little over the top frankly, but it works for dramatic comeuppance, right?) who needs everything to be perfectly clean and who doesn’t want to be bothered while he is working.  And there is no way he will cave on the dog thing.

Rufus’ mom looks for a way to make things better, so she buys Rufus a pet.  The pet is…  a guinea pig.  Rufus is devastated.  He decides to mock the guinea pig by naming her Fido.  Rufus and his dad finally agree on one thing–they want the guinea pig taken back to the store.  But when they go look for Petopia, the store is gone, without a trace.  They are stuck with Fido.

But very soon, Fido starts acting like a dog.  She makes little barking sounds, she plays, she catches Frisbees (sort of), she runs with him, she fetches things.  She does everything a dog can do.  Frankly, she is amazing (I certainly looked askance at my guinea pigs after reading this).

And yet, Rufus doesn’t want anyone to see this creature.  He doesn’t like having attention drawn to himself (unlike his best friend who is a major attention hound). So he doesn’t want anyone to know about Fido’s skills.  But of course Fido is a playful, outgoing creature (who follows hm to school one day).  And soon, more and more people are aware of Fido.

But here’s where the story falls apart for me–Rufus is so anti-Fido for so long, no matter what she does, no matter how cool she is or even how cool his friends tell him she is, he is constantly annoyed and bummed that she is not a real dog.  His one note obsession with wanting a real dog is annoying and rather unbelievable.  If you had a guinea pig who could do the things that Fido could do, you should not be trying to hide her way or make her less like a dog, no matter how much you didn’t like attention.  Of course, my kids didn’t feel this way so maybe I am imposing adult opinions on Rufus.

By the end of the book, of course, he comes around (Fido even saves him when he gets hurt), but he is a fairly unpleasant main character.

Yet while I didn’t like that aspect, I enjoyed most of the rest of the book quite a lot.

The secondary characters are far more enjoyable.  His best friend, Murphy, is an attention hound and is very funny.  The girl in the class who likes him. Lurena, is awesome–she is aggressively nerdy and smart but very funny (that she calls his parents by their first names (and the way he reacts to that) is hilarious)  She loves all rodents and has a chinchilla and a hamster named “Sharmet”–an anagram of Hamster).  Even his best friend’s other friend, Dmitri, is well done–he’s terribly annoying but not exactly mean, but sort of mean.  It’s a good cast.

And the other details of the story are good too–Rufus collects Scrabble tiles (a weird and funny hobby) because he also loves anagrams–if only Lurena weren’t so annoying, she’d be perfect.  Best of all, the dialogue is really sharp.

I love the way Rufus interacts with his dad, who is constantly annoyed by him.  So we get something like this:

“‘Copy that’ was my new favorite way of saying ‘okay,’ replacing, ‘Gotcha, chief,’ which Dad recently made me stop saying.”  So he keeps saying Copy that until his dad gets mad at that too.

And I really liked that Fido’s “gift” is simply never explained–it’s just a mystery–because that’s not the point of the story.

While a main character who you don’t especially like should kill a book, it really doesn’t kill this one.  Because the star is Fido, and she is pretty awesome.  And the kids liked it too.