Beelzebub's library

  Soupy Leaves Home, is a classic historical adventure. I used to listen to books that were like this graphic novel on book on tape all the time. As children, I and my siblings loved learning about how people lived back in the olden times, and the various hijinks they experienced. This book is a little more adult than what we might listen to, but I don’t think it’s any more disturbing than To Kill A Mockingbird.             The story is about a teenage girl, who adopts the term Soupy after disguising herself as a man and leaving her abusive father and helpless aunt, to become a hobo. She befriends a kind, wise old man named Remy, who teaches her how to survive a life on the run.             The narrative is enjoyable, with a lot of introspection and character building moments. The characters of Remy and the other...

(I like this cover a lot)   When my family and I were driving down from the suburbs in South Carolina to a Fort in Florida. It was a long drive, with lots of traffic and continuous driving. We listened to “The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish” and “The Wolves in the Walls” and “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” and a couple other short stories on tape. But, the two books we listened to the most were M.T. Anderson’s first two entries in the Pals In Perils , “Whales on Stilts” and “The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen” (We’ll cover that one later).             I loved both of those books, although I didn’t get to continue the series until much later. Today we’re going to talk about Whales on Stilts, an adventure-sci-fi-throwback-meta-spy children’s book. These books are amazing. The main characters, Lily (the shy girl), Katie (the less shy girl), and the delightful Jasper Dash, have a ne...