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Kid Vs. Squid (2010)

by Greg Van Eekhout(Favorite Author)

3.77 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1599904896 (ISBN13: 9781599904894)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Bloomsbury USA Childrens

review 1: Sometimes you just need a gentle, whimsical book that makes you feel like a kid again. That's what I needed this week, and that's why I picked up Greg Van Eekhout's book. I bought it at Phoenix Comicon and had it signed to my son.I would have enjoyed this as a kid, too, even if it gets a little creepy at times. I love how it uses the California coast as a setting (it even mentions Pismo later on, a familiar place for me), with a boy abandoned in his weird uncle's museum of strange things for his summer vacation. The town's tourism season mysteriously starts overnight, and Thatcher discovers things only get weirder from there. Thatcher has a great voice. He babbles, he's not perfect, but he makes a great team with the two strong girls in the book, Shoal and Trudy; I really ... moreloved Trudy! It's a solid middle grade book for boys or girls.
review 2: Kid vs. Squid by Greg van Eekhout is a fast-paced book about a boy named Thatcher who has to spend his summer with his crazy uncle Griswald on a California beach town called Las Huesas. His uncle owns The Museum of the Strange and Curious and this is where Thatcher is expected to spend his summer days. The story is told through Thatcher’s voice, which is so real the reader wants to join him on his crazy adventure. He’s clever, funny and a great story-teller. The descriptions are witty and imaginative, especially when describing his uncles’ oddities in the museum, which opens up the book at the first few pages. He writes...“He even kept a mummy in a glass-lidded sarcophagus, resting on a pair of sawhorses. It was the color of beef jerky, with dark black squiggles down its arms that looked like sea horses. Griswald said the squiggles were tattoos. I thought they were done in magic marker.” In no time the story picks up its pace when the What-Is-It (an old box that contains a shriveled up head of someone or something important)….is stolen by a young girl, Shoal, who turns out to be the princess of Atlantis. She and her people are cursed and she needs to end it. Thatcher and his new friend Trudy end up helping Shoal reverse the curse and along the way they encounter some grizzly characters of the sea.This book has a grade equivalent of 4.6 and lexile of 750L. For those students who are not crazy about reading, but enjoy fantasy with a quick-pace, this one might get them reading during their free time. It’s also a good read for the students who want to (but are not quite ready for) the Percy Jackson books. less

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