Dumbstruck - Hardcover

Pennypacker makes a winning debut with this witty, quixotic novel that opens with a portentous prologue. Just before he is killed by a bus, a scientist discovers "a layer of pure knowledge--a sort of smart soup," above the clouds atop Mount Everest. He also learns that this layer was thickest "in the middle of moonless nights." Years later, at midnight on such a night, 10-year-old Ivy Greene (whose features have a "slightly off-centered placement" that "suggested that whoever had been in charge of arranging her face may have been new at the job") hears her mother and father babbling in the garden below her window; in the morning they are nowhere to be found. On her madcap quest for her lost parents, Ivy meets up with a handful of fanciful characters, including Pearletta Swicegood, a dotty neighbor who watches game shows each morning and spends the afternoon shopping for the prizes she has "won"; Armilda Clott and her "lumpy and grayish" husband, Borage, the wicked owners of an orphanage; and the resourceful, pumpkin-shaped Aunt Zilpa, who lives with her 300-pound pet ostrich in the small town of Cheese Bend. Auch's ( Bird Dogs Can't Fly ) caricature-like drawings deepen the humor of Pennypacker's uproarious tale. Ages 9-12.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a crackerjack first novel written with the verve of Margaret Mahy at her most sportive, Ivy Greene finds herself inexplicably abandoned by her normally conscientious parents. While searching for them she encounters numerous weird characters such as the vile Borage Clott, who runs the Wretched Dear Darlings' Blessed Haven Orphanage (the ``gray and lumpish'' Borage smells of toads and moldy cheese, possibly because he gnaws on his own bare feet). Ivy has never been a stranger to odd people. Her aunt Zilpa, who helps figure out what's become of her parents, is a taxidermist who believes that ice cream is a complete and perfect food and keeps a 300-pound ostrich that makes a fetish of putting round things in holes (a result of being yanked unhatched from his nest). It turns out that Ivy's folks had their common sense sucked out while standing in their own back yard on a night of total darkness--they're literally dumbstruck. Fortunately, Ivy and Zilpa are able to restore their intelligence. Highly original fun spiced with hilarious descriptions of the daft goings-on; a great readaloud. With suitably zany illustrations. (Fiction. 8+) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.