Read on Twitter
Few authors have had as much influence on my progress as a human being - to say nothing of my writing - as @DanielPinkwater. The course of my life was profoundly altered by reading Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy From Mars in middle school, and I have read dozens of his books since.
1/
1/
I find that many distinctive authors circle themes and plots, like a cannoneer rangefinding with artillery, trying to bullseye some impossible-to-define perfect target. I county myself in that group, and I definitely count Pinkwater there.
2/
2/
I can& #39;t tell you exactly what it is he& #39;s trying to hit, but every book seems to come closer to some irreducible Pinkwaterian ideal, and his latest, Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, is the closest he& #39;s come yet.
https://tachyonpublications.com/bestselling-author-daniel-pinkwater-returns-in-classic-form-with-the-illustrated-middle-grade-adventures-of-a-dwergish-girl/
3/">https://tachyonpublications.com/bestselli...
https://tachyonpublications.com/bestselling-author-daniel-pinkwater-returns-in-classic-form-with-the-illustrated-middle-grade-adventures-of-a-dwergish-girl/
3/">https://tachyonpublications.com/bestselli...
First, let me attempt* to summarize the plot. Dwergs are basically a magical race inhabiting the Hudson Valley. They& #39;re something like Tolkien& #39;s dwarves, but not. Male dwergs are pretty odd-looking and rarely venture into the world.
*"Attempt" is doing a lot of work here.
4/
*"Attempt" is doing a lot of work here.
4/
But female Dwergs, like protagonist Molly O& #39;Malley, can pass for short-ish humans, albeit with very large feet and the ability to move with uncanny speed through the woods near Kingston, NY.
5/
5/
Molly can& #39;t abide the sameness and dullness of life in the unchanging, eternal Dwergish village of her birth, so she moves to Kingston, NY, where she befriends Arnold Babatunji, a Naples-obsessed restaurateur who runs the Hudson Valley& #39;s greatest pizzeria, who hires Molly.
6/
6/
For a time, life is good. Molly learns about pizza, pals around with a former boy-genius who runs the village radio station, and sleeps in a forest dwelling of her own devising, supplementing her income with the cash from the lumpy Dwergish gold coin she& #39;s pawned.
7/
7/
But the pawn-broker is tied up with gangsters - some of them ghosts, some living - and then Molly befriends Leni, an indigenous girl whose people have lived in the Catskills since time immemorial.
8/
8/
Leni tempts Molly to ride the Greyhound to NYC, where she rides the subway, and, more importantly, samples the indescribable wonderments of papaya juice and all-beef franks, which change her life.
9/
9/
And of course, while in New York, Molly encounters Carlos Chatterjee, a Revolutionary War reenactor who runs a spectacular junk shoppe on the mezzanine of an uptown MTA station.
10/
10/
Carlos turns out to be crucial to the resolution of Molly& #39;s main challenge, which is the transdimensional meat-robots in British redcoat uniforms who seem to be bent on reenacting the 1777 burning of Kingston (spoilers!).
11/
11/
Averting this disaster is a big project for Molly, who enlists the Catskills Witch (who has moved to Manhattan) and the semi-mythical King of the Dwergs, who uses bee-style waggle-dancing to advise them.
12/
12/
This is a book with:
So.
Much.
Stuff.
13/
So.
Much.
Stuff.
13/
My all-time favorite place to eat in NYC is Shopsins. Pinkwater novels are like expanded Shopsins menus. Motto: "nothing exceeds like excess." But this isn& #39;t mere kitchen-sinkery: it& #39;s skilled wunderkammering, a carefully curated study in contrasts.
http://www.shopsins.com/menu/shopsinstogo.pdf
14/">https://www.shopsins.com/menu/shop...
http://www.shopsins.com/menu/shopsinstogo.pdf
14/">https://www.shopsins.com/menu/shop...
Pinkwater insists that his books aren& #39;t "weird" and even bristles at the suggestion:
https://twitter.com/DanielPinkwater/status/1227548549199650817
I">https://twitter.com/DanielPin... take him to mean that he& #39;s describing the world as he perceives it, not adding any weirdness. We live in a weird place. 2020 certainly proves that hypothesis.
15/
https://twitter.com/DanielPinkwater/status/1227548549199650817
I">https://twitter.com/DanielPin... take him to mean that he& #39;s describing the world as he perceives it, not adding any weirdness. We live in a weird place. 2020 certainly proves that hypothesis.
15/
I think there& #39;s something to this - the thing that makes Pinkwater& #39;s work so great is his ability to describe the everyday absurdity in terms that make it clear how weird normalcy is (and vice-versa).
16/
16/
That& #39;s definitely Dwergish Girl& #39;s charm. I read this to my 12 year old, who is way too cool to be getting bedtime stories of her old, irrelevant father& #39;s favorite weird writers.
17/
17/
Every night, she insisted that she didn& #39;t want me to read from it. Every night, she begged for another chapter when I was done (and interrupted repeatedly to ask incisive questions about the Revolutionary war, papaya juice, ghosts, radio announcers, etc).
18/
18/
