Mistakes Were Made is the first in a six-book series about Timmy Failure by cartoonist Stephan Pastis. Larrabee and I like books that make us laugh and this one definitely did.

Timmy is a middle schooler and the CEO of his own detective agency, Total Failure, Inc. His business partner is a polar bear who loves chicken nuggets. And his nemesis is rival detective Corrina Corrina, also known as something that rhymes with Weevil Bun.

The first few lines of the prologue will give you a sense of the witty tone of the book: “It’s harder to drive a polar bear into someone’s living room than you’d think. You need a living-room window that’s big enough to fit a car. You need a car that’s big enough to fit a polar bear. And you need a polar bear that’s big enough to not point out your errors.”

Larrabee and I took turns reading this book aloud to each other, sitting side by side on the couch so that we could both see the illustrations. I’m glad we read it together for several reasons:

1. Timmy is an imaginative and unreliable narrator, and Larrabee’s not used to having to question a narrator’s version of events. For example, Timmy says that he eats alone at lunch recess so that he can do global strategic planning for his detective agency without the other kids committing an act of industrial sabotage.
2. The book has some big words–mendacity, subterfuge, surveillance, hypocritical, citadel. For a kid who doesn’t always excel in school, Timmy has an extensive vocabulary and knows how to use it.
3. Timmy doesn’t always make good choices. Although Larrabee and I read mostly for fun, if we find the occasional life lesson, so much the better.

 

Blaine and I finally finished The Crimson Skew, the last book in S.E. Grove’s Mapmakers Trilogy. The novels are lengthy, and our read aloud time is limited, so we’ve been on this fantastical journey for a long time. Coming to the conclusion was bittersweet.

As I mentioned my review of the first book, The Glass Sentence, the premise of this trilogy is that the Great Disruption of 1799 flung the world’s continents into different historical periods. In the first book, we meet 13-year-old Sophia, a Boston resident and niece of a famous cartologist, and Theo, a refugee from the Baldlands with a mysterious past.

In the second book, The Golden Specific, Sophia and Theo are accidentally separated. Sophia travels to the Papal States (medieval Europe) in search of her missing parents. There she meets new allies, learns more about the Ages, and finds a new map. Meanwhile, Theo stays in 1892 Boston and attempts to discover who murdered the Prime Minister.

In The Crimson Skew, while Sophia continues her search for her parents, she and her friends must journey to the Eerie Sea to obtain a special memory map that may prevent a war between New Occident and the Indian Territories.

When we finished the book, Blaine commented: “It’s a good thing that memory maps aren’t real because you’d be obsessed with them. And you already take enough pictures of our vacations.” That’s quite true, but, all the same, I wish memory maps were real.

The publisher recommends this trilogy for fans of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and I agree. That reminds me. I should find my copy of The Golden Compass for Blaine…