Inside, Outside, Yourside, Ourside: Mr. Chickee's Messy Mission by Christopher Paul Curtis

The 2007 sequel to Christopher Paul Curtis' Mr. Chickee's Funny Money brings back the FDOF (Future Detectives of Flint) Club, now presided over by the formidable Richelle Cyrus-Herdon, the undisputed smartest kid at Clark Elementary School, in another zany, wacky, weird, and satiric mystery-fantasy-tall tale-adventure outing. Steven Daemon Carter, former prez of the FDOF, is currently being stalked by a remote controlled robot Canada goose sent by the vindictive Treasury Agent Fondoo, but that's the least of Steven's problems.

While Steven is digging out from the fake snow dumped by Fondoo's robot goose only on his own front yard, his bud and co-future detective Russell Wood involves him in the strange disappearance of his dog. It seems Russell's Chihuahua, Rodney Rodent, has jumped, woofing "Bow Wow Wow Yippee Yo Yippee Yay," into an alternate universe portal, concealed as a window in an outdoor mural presided over by a scary gnome. (Don't you just hate it when that happens?)

So naturally all three members of the FDOF have to follow, singing the same weird song, into another dimension in which they find Mr. Chickee and agree to take on a quest to save that world, which he terms Ourside and possibly their world, which he calls Yourside from sure destruction by the evil and cruel Ursa Theodora-Saurus. (Don't ask!) Actually, only Russell B. Woods turns out to have the right stuff for the quest--that is, he is a genuine Old Soul who enters the H.A.L.F. world, where unfulfilled fictional characters reside until their authors finish out their plots. A fan of kids' writers B. T. Bowling, creator of the wizardly hero Harry Plodder, and Buster B. Bayliss, outdoor adventure writer, Russell follows his love for fiction into Bayliss's wilderness and blunders into a final confrontation with this unrealized and therefore bad-tempered fictional grumpus, Russell is able to draw on his imagination to survive the confrontation with Ursa and live to, um, tell the tale.

Middle readers who like their mysteries on the wild and crazy side will find this one as predictably unpredictable as a carnival ride through the fun house of horrors. On the way out, of course, Steven loses his great-granddaddy's talking and diss-ing unabridged dictionary, conveniently converted to thumb drive format for this adventure, in the realm of Ourside, thus insuring that Mr. Chickee's Messy Mission will definitely have a sequel featuring, um, information retrieval in the offing soon.

But as you know by now, anything can happen in Flint, Michigan!