Description:

From Booklist

Reviewed with Terry Denton's Storymaze 2.

Gr. 3-6. Australian cartoonist and author Denton serves up two wacky adventures studded with puns and literary riffs that alternate between narrative and comics format. The stories are told by a self-conscious, occasionally self-absorbed, narrator and are populated by humanoid aliens who live in a parallel universe where surfing, power politics, and good versus evil are much as we find them in the here and now. One character speaks only digitally ("'10101,' says Mikey"), but a decoder glossary is appended. In addition to pure silliness, a valuable commodity in itself, these small books challenge reading skills, requiring kids to absorb parallel viewpoints and switch between text and an image-driven format. The few unexplained Australian terms hardly matter, as the stories themselves are so clear. In the first adventure, readers meet Icon and are introduced to the difficulties in Duryllium; in the second Icon's younger brother challenges him for power. These won't have universal appeal among children, but they are destined to earn a loyal following among a few, who will appreciate knowing that more adventures are on the way. Francisca Goldsmith
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Review

"Denton’s illustrations prove as wonderfully weird as his text . . . will appeal to those who like to laugh." -- KLIATT

"Zany." -- Bookpage