The Neddiad

Author: Daniel Pinkwater

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Publication Year: 2007

Most of the readers will be: 4th through 7th grade girls and boys.

Reader's Advisory: For another totally weird book in which a kid saves the world, please read The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex. 

Summary: 

Neddie and his family move by train from Chicago to Los Angeles. On the way Neddie acquires a sacred turtle sculpture, gets separated from his family, meets a movie star and his son, meets a ghost, sees the Grand Canyon...and that's all before he even gets to LA. Soon he realizes there are people after his sacred turtle, and he must protect it. The fate of the world is in his hands. 

My favorite passage:

We also played Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Superman, and Captain Midnight, which were movies and radio programs. The thing about all these games was that they were all about adventure. They were all about people going off away from their familiar homes to do important stuff. And in the world outside the backyards, it was like that. People were going off to war, and moving to different parts of the country to do different jobs. And people were arriving from places far away. Some of the kids were refugees - that is, kids whose families had escaped from Europe. There was Jan the Dutch kid, who always wore this brown overcoat, and Helmut the German kid, who refused to play Nazis in the battle games, and Luigi, whose salami sandwiches smelled better than ours.
I expected, we all expected, to do exciting things, and be a hero, like Dart-Onion, or Hopalong Cassidy, or the Count of Monte Cristo. This is why going away on a big adventure all the way across the country seemed normal to me. It is also why, when I was taken to the Louis B. Nettelhorst Elementary School to begin first grade, I said I wanted to major in literature. (pg 15-16)

What I really think:

This book is so delightfully strange. Neddie does a number of things that any kid would love to do and he has this great kid enthusiasm about it. He rides on a train across the country, he finds neat shops in LA - one that sells jokes and one that has taxidermied animals and artifacts called "Stuffed Stuff and Stuff," he swims in an abandoned pool, he visits a circus training facility, and he loves the La Brea Tar Pits. The book could have been all anecdotes of cool things Neddie did and I probably wouldn't have gotten tired of reading it. 

But then there is the weird stuff: Melvin the shaman who keeps popping up and giving Neddie, first the turtle, and then cryptic advice. The sacred turtle itself. Billy the Phantom Bellboy - yup, he's a ghost. Alien police. And the whole threat of the resurgence of the ice age.

I don't know how anyone would ever even think to write a story like this, but I'm so glad he did, because I loved every page of it.