Huggabie Falls is weird - probably the weirdest town on Earth! Every road is named Digmont Drive, everyone’s first and last names start with the same letter, normal is weird and weird is normal. And if the town itself is strange, the people who live there are even weirder. There’s a teacher who is also a witch, a baby who can do backflips, a pirate-hating pirate who lives in a multi-story trailer, a family of interdimensional beings whose house is upside down and inside out, a lab rat who speaks Portuguese, and a kid who may or may not have turned into a toilet.
But then the WEIRDEST thing happens. One might say it was EXTREMELY WEIRD: everything begins to turn normal! Kipp Kindle and his friends Tobias Treachery and Cymphany Chan decide to investigate and save the town - and they think it may have something to do with the newly established Dark’s Weirdness Investigation and Eradication Agency. But Cymphany, the only normal person in the town, has started acting strange - is she possessed by this terrifying and extremely weird spell that seems to have fallen over the town? Will the kids be able to save the town and return it to its normal weirdness?
This book is illustrated by Andrew Weldon, who manages to successfully capture the weirdness happening in Huggabie Falls in black and white drawings. There's so many small details, in fact, one might think he may have taken pictures with a camera as he watched the events unfold in person. But as Adam Cece repeatedly promises, our faithful storytellers are just relaying the story and weren't actually in Huggabie Falls. Or were they? You decide:
I have to admit that I, a 25 year old working on a PhD who mostly sees herself as an intellectual, have a major soft spot in my heart for whack-a-doodle books. This may have something to do with being exposed to nutty writing Gods like Shel Silverstein and Peggy Parish (who may or may not be from Huggabie Falls themselves with those names) during my extremely impressionable younger years. Whatever the reason, I will very rarely choose what some may call “fine literature” or “scholarly work” over something with a title like “Stink-Bomb and Ketchup Face.” Besides, I often find silly stories like these have good themes and lessons, like to be good to your friends, always do the right thing even if it’s hard, and to never, ever, ever hypnotize your principal, no matter how grumpy he is.
It is not often I compare a writer I have never heard of before to my “goofy kids book” idols like Terry Pratchett, Roald Dahl, RL Stine, and Debbie Dady/Marcia Thornton Jones. Andy Griffiths of The Treehouse Books and Alex Hirsch of Gravity Falls are a couple of the only recent additions to those ranks.
But Adam Cece joined those ranks within the first page of Huggabie Falls. Cece has a talent for hilarious and creative writing - some of his lines remind me of Series of Unfortunate Events, some remind me of Captain Underpants, and all of them are super fun. Take this one for example:
I absolutely cannot wait to read the rest of the series and any future books he writes. If this sounds like high praise, it is; and if it doesn’t sound like high praise, you’re just plain weird.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley. I was not compensated in any other fashion and all opinions on the book are my own and no one else’s unless otherwise indicated. Special thanks to the publisher and author for the opportunity to read this book.