M. T. ANDERSON is seven monkeys, six typewriters, and a Speak & Spell. It took them ten years to write The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen. Their previous books include Adf2yga^vvvv, Wpolw0ox.S Ppr2dgn shr Elssf, and The Riverside Edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Adf2yga^vvvv was a National Book Award finalist. The M. T. Anderson Monkey Collective is located outside Boston. Its hobbies include flash cards, hopping, and grooming for lice. It divides its time between the parallel bars and the banana trough.

Uh, yeah. I get the joke. I think I get the joke of The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen. Some of it was very funny. But did we have to discuss snot for so long, in so much detail? I got my fill, so to speak, of nasal excretions after about one sentence of descriptive prose, but it went on and on and on. It reminded me of a bunch of college guys who tell a gross joke, and then another, and another, and all the girls in the room are looking at each other and shaking their collective heads. (Now that’s an interesting word picture, collective shaking heads!)

The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen (I’m going to call it, affectionately, Lederhosen for short) is a pastiche of all those series you read when you were a kid back in the fifties and the sixties, if you were a kid back in the fifties and the sixties: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Danny Dunn, the Bobbsey Twins, cowboy series that I never read, stuff like that. Did you know that my librarian wouldn’t buy any of those series books because she said they weren’t up to the library’s standards? This was at the public library, mind you, not even the school library. I wonder what Ms. Karen, who in spite of her disdain for Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, really was a great librarian, would think of Lederhosen? Actually, I shudder to think.

Because I tend to pick up the style of the last book I read, I’m now doing a poor imitation of the style of Mr. Anderson (and the monkeys) in Lederhosen. He does tend to get lost, wandering down various rabbit trails, before getting to the point of the chapter. And what was the point, you ask? Well, I meant to say that Lederhosen makes fun of our childhood heroes in a good-natured, but sometimes snotty, way, and I wonder if children of the twentieth-first century who haven’t read Hardy Boys or other series of bygone days, will get the joke? As I type this review, Karate Kid, who has read Hardy Boys, is reading Lederhosen. I promise to ask him later what he thinks. He’s not laughing out loud.

To be continued . . .

After a couple of chapters I asked Karate Kid what he thought of the book. He said it wasn’t as good as Hardy Boys, so I think he gets the connection but not the joke. However, he’s still reading.

I’ll update you again when he’s finished, or you could just pick up a copy at the library for yourself. I can promise you that it’s . . . different. Lederhosen is one of the many odd books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction. Ummm, I mean “good books.” M.T. Anderson is the same author who also won a National Book Award this year for his historical fiction title, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party. I haven’t read it yet, but I gather it’s a much different book from Lederhosen. A prolific and versatile guy, Mr. Anderson, or maybe the monkeys . . . ?