I Just Read About That…

[LISTENED TO: December 29, 2014] Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware

We are now hooked on the Pals in Peril series.  This, the third book, promised to be the funniest and weirdest yet.  I mean, look at the title.

But this book proved problematic for us for two somewhat related reasons.  The first is that we usually listen to longer books like this when we have a lot of driving to do.  We didn’t have any major big drive ahead so we wound up listening in small chunks, which was a little confusing.  The kids were able to follow quite well, but after a couple of weeks some details are bound to get lost.  The second reason is that this book is long.  It was a 6 hour audio book as opposed to the 3 hours of the other two books.

The brevity of Whales on Stilts was a real treat.  In it, Anderson wrote that he didn’t like to write action scenes because they were all the same.  Same with chase scenes.  But in this book, he has our heroes slogging through the wilderness for literal days (and almost an entire disc).  It got a little samey, I feel–especially since we were listening in small chunks at a time.

This is not to say that the book wasn’t enjoyable. There were hundreds of hilarious moments in it.  Even in the duller sections, he often threw in an absurd joke (or ten) that made me laugh.  So maybe if we had listened all at once this would have held up better.  But honestly it was only the middle that was kind of trudging (when they were trudging) because the beginning and end were great.

This happens to be another book where reading it would have been entertaining in other ways–the characters of Delaware have virtually no vowels in their names.  Mark Cashman (who did another awesome job reading) does a fine job saying their names, but I had to find a print copy in the library because I needed to know how these crazy words were spelled.

So, what happens?

Well, in the beginning, we see that Jasper is a champion athletes on Pelt’s stare-eyes team.  (Yes, they have staring contests).  He has the best stare going (he can remain unblinking for hours).  They are up against the Delaware State Champs, a team that has been undefeated and about whom legends of fearsome staring have sprung.  The Delaware team even manages to turn their eyeballs into other shapes–what?–which freaks the other teams out, let me tell you.

The Pelt team captain, Choat Brinsley is a big studly guy and Katie has a crush on him, but he clearly has no time for her (never date anyone whose name sounds like a prep school).  And this is obviously very upsetting (for Katie, if not one else–Lily tells her not to worry about him ,he;s a jerk).  But none of that is as upsetting as the fact that their team is getting slaughtered by the Delaware team (and their mean coach and team mom).  Even Jasper loses–because his concentration was broken by a cry for help

And that’s when we learn of Jasper’s past in the monastery of Vbngoom.  He spent some time there learning with the monks and made a very good friend in Drgnan Pghlik–and it is Drgnan Pghlik who is calling for help (with his mind).

And so our friends are destined to set off for Delaware.  Now what is awesome about this book is that Anderson writes about Delaware, but as he indicates:

NOTE: For those interested in learning more about the fascinating state of Delaware, in which this book takes place, we have provided a highly educational, completely erroneous Tourist’s Guide to Deepest, Darkest Delaware.  [It is worth clicking on]  Also worth clicking on is the complaint thank you from Delaware Governor Jack Markell.  It is quite funny in its own right.

And highly erroneous it is:

It is into the mist-shrouded heart of this forbidden, mountainous realm that our plucky and intrepid heroes – Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, and his friends Lily and Katie – must journey to unravel a terrible mystery.

Come along on a tale of grand adventure that includes in its pages: Lost cities! Tentacles! Monks! Dinosaurs! Gangsters! Cheap suits! Eye doctors! And, of course, the fabled Curse of the Jaguar!

So indeed, according to Jasper, there are dinosaurs, there are mountains, there are monasteries, there is an Autarch and they have their own currency.  They even speak their own language–Doverian.  It is all really hilarious. What is even more hilarious is that Katie keeps pointing out how none of this is true.  Delware is just the state next to New Jersey for heaven’s sake.  At one point Jasper says that it takes two days to drive from central Delaware to the mountains of Delawre.  Katie points out that driving two days north in Delaware gets you into Canada. But her complaints fall on deaf ears…and jasper proves to be right.

So our heroes meet an increasingly strange collection of Doverians with increasingly hard to pronounce names (again, good job Mark Cashman).  There are spies everywhere, there are goats in the showers and there are vaultapults on all of the buildings (these are spoon shaped catapults which vault you from one building to the trampoline on the following building (all for a mere 15 Delaware cents).

The kids slog through Delaware on a multi-day hike in which they meet bizarre creatures, drink the Autarch’s brown bottled water and even meet a tourist (from New York) with her handy copy of There & Back Again™ (which tell s you exactly where the secret monastery is actually located).

Eventually Jasper determines that his arch-nemesis, inter-dimensional criminal Bobby Spandrell is behind all of this.  Jasper has thwarted all of Spandrell’s plans (including his plans for a typo filled “lootery” (ha!) designed to take everyone’s money.  But Spandrell has used some human interlopers as well–mobsters who have taken over the monastery (they are quite comical, if not deadly).  They have imprisoned Phglk (in a game room with a tiger, of course) and are making the monks do all of their work for them.  They are also using the monks’ powers to make their stare-eyes team unbeatable (all so they can sell the monks’ things to collectors). 

There’s so much else going on that it’s impossible to summarize effectively (I’ve thought of about five more subplots as I was editing this).  But I loved the way there were wonderful coincidences that pushed the plot along. The way the kids get rid of the spy that’s with them is excellent.  The way they dispatch a monster is hilarious and the fact that Jasper’s atomic ray gun takes AAA batteries make me laugh every time.  The way Cashman did the Doverian accent was also hilarious–the benefit of an audiobook.

Despite all of the elements and weird things that Anderson introduces, he wraps everything up so perfectly (if not crazily).  Forgotten characters appear and become hugely important, other characters prove to be untrustworthy and of course bad guys are just bad guys.  And the ending is sweet and adorable and also quite funny.

I love all the funny things that Anderson threw into the book–the romantic subplot that is suddenly quashed with a mocking reference to the Cutesy Dell Twins books.  The pages from the There & Back Again™ guide and of course all of the absurdities about Delaware.  The only thing I miss are the meta references to Jasper and Katie’s series.  The first book had a lot of fun (with footnotes or pages from books or something–hard to tell in the audiobook) with referencing their past exploits.  And those aren’t here.  There is a very funny reference to Gargletine, but it’s done in a very different way than in the first book.  I’m glad that Anderson is not rehashing the same types of jokes, but they were so funny I’d love to see him twist them in funny ways and mention them again (especially in a book dedicated to Jasper Dash!).

The end of the audio book features the Delaware State Song with music and lyrics sung by Mark Cashman!

So all in all this story was very satisfying.  It felt too long to us, but again that may have just been the way we listened to it.  I am of course looking forward to the next book (although horrors, it seems that the fifth book has not (yet) been made into a audio book).  We’ll just wait until we have a long stretch of listening time ahead of us.

As a postscript, I’ll include this from Anderson’s website in which he says about Delaware:

I have written a book about Delaware. Cut off from the world for generations by its prohibitive interstate tolls, Delaware, to most of us, is nothing but an exotic name, a realm of fantasy. I determined to pierce the veil of mystery. I determined to reach deep inside the Blue Hen State and yank out its giblets for all to see.

No, okay, I’ve never actually been to Delaware. I may not be one of your so-called “experts” on the state. But I looked at MapQuest for at least six or seven minutes, and any fool could tell you that Dragon Creek must be dragon infested, and Red Lion Creek must be red lion infested, and that Sandtown is a caravanserai in the middle of a desert. It doesn’t take a PhD in Geography to tell that seaside hamlets with names like Slaughter Beach and Broadkill are the haunts of Vikings. You don’t need to be a member of the Adventurers’ Club to figure out that the largest building in Ogletown is an observatory, or to guess that when you visit the village of Bear, you better hide your food up a tree.