Dory Fantasmagory

Starred review from September 15, 2014
Dory’s nickname, “Rascal,” is an immediate tip-off to the six-year-old’s personality, but there’s more to Dory than just being a spitfire. To combat her older siblings’ refusal to play with her because she’s a “baby,” Dory conjures up Mary, a monster friend who appreciates her incessant questions, like “Why do we have armpits?” and “What is the opposite of sandwich?” Dory’s pestering leads Luke and Violet to tell her that 507-year-old Mrs. Gobble Gracker, “who robs baby girls,” is looking for her. This sets Dory’s imagination spinning, leading to the appearance of the vampiric Mrs. Gobble Gracker and the gnomelike Mr. Nuggy, who introduces himself as her fairy godmother. Reality and fantasy combine hilariously in a story that, at heart, is about a girl who wants little more than to spend time with her brother and sister. Hanlon’s (Ralph Tells a Story) loosely scrawled illustrations, speech balloons, and hand-lettering are an enormous part of the story’s humor, channeling Dory’s energy and emotions as emphatically as the narration. Time spent with Dory is time well spent. Ages 6–8. Agent: Ann Tobias, A Literary Agency for Children’s Books.

Starred review from September 1, 2014
With words, pictures and pictures with words, 6-year-old Dory, called Rascal, recounts how she finally gets her older brother and sister to play with her. Rascal's siblings complain that she's always pestering them. She acts like a baby, she asks weird questions, and she chatters endlessly with her imaginary monster friend. So they tell her a kidnapping witch, Mrs. Gobble Gracker, is looking for her. In her efforts to avoid capture, Rascal becomes a dog. As a "dog," she's invisible to the little-girl-stealer but appealing to her older brother, who, it turns out, always wanted to have a dog. She maintains her dogginess all the way through a doctor's checkup until a surprise vaccination spurs her to speech and retaliation. Rascal and her invented fairy godmother, Mr. Nuggy (he doesn't look much like a fairy godmother), use the ensuing timeout to concoct poison soup for the witch. Eventually, the witch is vanquished and order more or less restored. Redeemed in the eyes of her siblings because she's brave enough to retrieve a bouncy ball from the toilet as well as wildly imaginative, Rascal finally gets her wish. Often just on the edge of out of control, this inventive child is irresistible and her voice, convincing. Childlike drawings, often embellished with hand-lettered narrative or speech bubbles, of round-headed humans, Sendak-ian monsters and a snaggle-toothed witch add to the humor. Charming, funny and true to life. (Fiction. 6-9)

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Starred review from November 1, 2014

Gr 1-3-Six-year-old Dory, known as Rascal to her family, wants more than anything to be included in her older siblings's fun, but her endless questions and make-believe monsters drive them crazy. When Violet and Luke tell Dory a bedtime story about the evil Mrs. Gobble Grackle, who steals baby girls, they unintentionally feed her already overactive imagination. Dory and her imaginary friend, Mary (who resembles Maurice Sendak's Max), are always on the lookout for monsters, and they thwart Mrs. Gobble Grackle's attempts to kidnap her with banana peels and sleep-inducing darts. When Dory pretends to be the dog her brother has always wanted, she convinces Mrs. G that she isn't the baby to kidnap and sabotages a trip to the doctor's office. Hanlon effectively uses many childlike pencil drawings and word balloons interspersed with a good mix of short and long sentences in brief, episodic chapters full of Dory's hilarious adventures. New vocabulary words are used in context within familiar settings and situations for the audience, creating a successful transitional book for new readers ready for longer stories. Dory ultimately finds a way to prove her bravery to her brother and sister, and readers will laugh at her entertaining antics.-Kristine M. Casper, Huntington Public Library, NY

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