What-the-Dickens

When it comes to finding good children's or YA novels, my friend Carmen is a great source for recommendations. We were talking a week or so ago about our boys losing teeth and she mentioned a book she'd recently read, Gregory Maguire's What-the-Dickens: The Story of A Rogue Tooth Fairy. If she didn't offer to lend me her copy, I'd likely have waited, quite possibly for years, before picking it up. Instead, I read it fairly fast, considering I was also reading three other books and only dipping into this novel occasionally.

It's a cute story of a tale a boy tells his three cousins on a dark night to distract them from a terrible storm and their parents' disappearance. The tale is about an orphaned skibbereen, who comes to be called What-the-Dickens. As he fumbles around trying to find his place in the world, he meets an owl, a cat, a tiger, and Pepper, another skibbereen who is a tooth fairy. What-the-Dickens doesn't understand the many rules that govern the skibbereen, including that they work alone and are not to be seen by humans. Pepper belongs to a colony of skibbereen (there are other colonies with strong rivalries between the different tribes) and introduces What-the-Dickens to this world.

I'd never read anything by Gregory Maguire, the man who made his fame from writing Wicked. I did like his writing style and he did a good job letting the story unfold and bringing it back full circle. I've heard so much hype about Wicked that I may have to check it out (eventually) now that I have read something charming Maguire wrote that didn't receive as much acclaim.