Professor Popkin's Prodigious Polish: A Tale of Coven Tree - Hardcover

In the small town of Coven Tree, Maine, the Devil is up to his old tricks. As in past antics ( The Wish Giver ; The Devil's Donkey ), Ole Nick does his best to trick the people of this peaceful town, and is again foiled by Yankee ingenuity and community spirit. This time, the focus is a cleaning fluid made of lost souls, "guaranteed to give new life" to whatever it cleans. Naive Luther Gilpin is lured by the idea of the easy money to be gained from selling the potent polish. Axes, awls, woodstoves and toy soldiers come to evil life as Luther demonstrates the product, but luckily his mother's lye soap can clean up any mess. Luther sends the concoction back to wherever it came from, and decides that farming is not such a bad way to earn a living. Like Natalie Babbitt's The Devil's Storybook , Brittain's version of evil hinges upon on human foibles, and his sense of humor is ever apparent. This story makes for good Halloween reading. Illustrations not seen by PW . Ages 8-12.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

That selling's not all "sunshine and roses" is the painful discovery young Luther Gilpin makes when he undertakes the purveying of Professor Popkin's prodigious polish. Guaranteed to bring " new life to household objects," the polish is , well, devilishly effective. No surprise, that, for this is another of Brittain's popular tales of Coven Tree, the New England village where the devil is in the driver's seat and where it is demonstrably true, as Sir Richard Burton noted, that "needs must when the devil drives." What Luther needs to do, it develops, is the right thing, to remedy the comic and calamitous wrongs that he has innocently wreaked on his friends and neighbors. How our teenage hero undertakes this lends drama and tension to an otherwise rollicking, good-humored story. Add to this the author's clever premise and engaging narrative voice and the bottom line is another Brittain success. --Michael Cart, Beverly Hills Public Library
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.