Henry Cicada's Extraordinary Elktonium Escapade

October 1, 2015
Henry Cicada's dream is to be ordinary and unnoticed, but he learns that sometimes being yourself is much better than being invisible. With his bald head and his bright-green, size-14-1/2 high tops, Henry is far from ordinary. But even with those strikes against him, his dream still has a chance. At least until he decides to stand up to the school bully, to adopt a three-legged puppy, and to travel across 40-odd dimensions in a reality-bending doghouse. There, he enters the imagination of Lulu, a girl in desperate need of a friend. Henry and his father are themselves floundering following the death of Henry's mother. Henry copes by trying to be ordinary. His father spends every waking moment trying to make something useful from Elktonium, his late wife's discovery. As Henry defends Lulu and his fellow students, he discovers a foundational truth: helping someone else in pain can make one's own pain a bit easier to bear. While the underlying messages are solid, the constant barrage of wackiness robs Henry's story of much of its power. The discussion of death, emotional abuse, and grief amid lame jokes, bizarre characters, and a peculiar setting is more off-putting than humorous. Whimsy gone wrong. (Fantasy. 8-12)

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November 1, 2015

Gr 4-6-As far as Henry Cicada, a boy in pursuit of normalcy, is concerned, Elktonium, a metal invented by his mother right before she died of cancer, is utterly useless. The humiliatingly huge, shimmering green, tropical, Mr. Clean-scented pair of Elktonium sneakers his father makes him wear on his first day of sixth grade just proves it. Therefore, Henry is shocked when the strange Elktonium pyramid in the yard catapults him into another dimension (dimensions 47-49, to be exact), where he finds himself in the imagination of a girl named Lulu. Lulu's aunt Tiffany seeks to destroy the girl's imagination entirely, and Henry makes it his goal to thwart her schemes. Both Henry Cicada's warping of reality into wacky allegory and the antics of Tiffany, its fake-tanned, cowboy-booted villainess, recall the work of Roald Dahl, whom Teague acknowledges with a reference to The BFG. Meanwhile, the clever absurdity of the dialogue and the constant use of wordplay evoke the same delight as Norton Juster's classic, The Phantom Tollbooth. Henry's own innate outrageousness proves his greatest strength as he embarks on his plutonium- and rocket-powered escapades, and his fast-paced adventures will win over avid and reluctant readers alike. VERDICT Wry, bizarre, and as audacious as Henry himself, this is one fantasy/adventure not to be missed.-Anna Stover, Poughkeepsie Day School, NY

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