Missing Person Mission: Duck Duck Moose by Mary Sullivan

It's a serene morning on the farm until as frantic girl races up with a disturbing query--

WHERE IS GOOSE?

Oh, dear! Moose takes charge! The tractor is still attached to its trailer, perfect for a missing person search...

GET BIG MOE!

Big Moe is cranked with amid some clunks and pows as Duck and Duck and Moose climb into the trailer and the girl takes the wheel, all with one mission, to find Goose immediately. Bucolic bystanders, Horse and Sheep, point the way they saw Goose go. But soon there's an obstacle--the gate is locked and the key is hanging on the tree, way up there. Leaps and flapping attempts to reach it fail, so Moose tries a totem pole arrangement, with the two ducks on top of each other on top of his head. The top duck stretches high into the tree and ...

BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ!

A swarm of hornets bring them all crashing down in the mud.

THONK! WHACK! STING! STANG! STUNG!

Mission aborted. After soaking in a bubbly bath, the three call it a day, and plastered with bandaids, Goose, Goose, and Moose repair to bed, still sad and without the mysteriously missing Goose.

The Caldecott-winning author-illustrator Mary Sullivan's latest, Duck, Duck, Moose (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) is a beginning reader full of merry mayhem with onomatopoeic words and obvious affection for the muddled characters' missing friend (who, in the conclusion, shows up with beach bag, surfboard, and a mystified expression at her reception). With controlled vocabulary, visual cues, and plenty of repeated words and phrases, this slapstick story is filled with action and humor, perfect for early readers.

Sullivan's literary output is filled with delightfully humorous picture books that charm young listeners as readalongs, readalouds, or beginning readers: Ball, Treat, Up On Bob, Frankie, and Nobody's Duck. (See reviews here).

The Few, The Chosen: Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle by Katie Coyle

Peter takes a breath. "First of all, you have to understand that as high-profile as they've made me, they still haven't admitted to me that they faked the Rapture. I don't know where the corporation's hidden the missing Raptured, and I don't know what they have planned for the Apocalypse."

On the morning after the Church of America's proclaimed Rapture, Vivian Apple had found her parents gone, supposedly ascended to Heaven through two holes in their bedroom ceiling. But Vivian is not a Believer in the charismatic Beaton Frick's end-of-time Apocalypse, and she believes that her parents are alive somewhere. She joins her best friend Harp and Peter Ivey, a boy she had met at the Rapture Night party, and head for California. In a skirmish with the Church, Vivian sees the Church elders kill her father. Peter is captured and Vivian fears he is dead.

But Vivian's intuitive disbelief is reinforced when she finds her mother, escaped from the captivity with the other Raptured but still a believer, living with Viv's half-sister Winnie, who connects Vivian and Harp with the anti-Church Resistance movement. Well funded and training to overthrow the Church Corporation, this militia seems the only hope that the hoax can be uncovered and the Church of America discredited. But first Vivian has to get to Peter, now revealed by the Church as the son of one of the founders and a heralded leader of the cult, and find out if he has really become a Believer.

California is a shell of itself, shrinking to dust in drought, with wildfires surrounding the city, with the Believers self-absorbed in their own hopes for the now-promised "Second Boat" Rapture, girls in bonnets and body-concealing couture hawked in constant television ads sponsored by the Church of America, while the rest of the population fights among themselves or tries to find some way out. Into this situation come Vivian and Harp, seventeen-year-old self-appointed Wonder Women, with their determined band of resisters, believing that destroying the leaders of the Church is their only hope to restore sanity to their world. But Vivian voices her lack of conviction that violence is the best answer to violence.

"That's the thing, isn't it? It isn't happening. It's being done. It wasn't a mistake. The Church knew what they were doing. The woman who killed Robbie knew when she pulled the trigger. She might not even have been a Believer." I close my eyes.

"What proof do we have that taking down the Church will change anything? What if it isn't the Church making people act like this?

What if this is just the way people are?"

Following her award-winning first book, Vivian Apple at the End of the World (see my January, 2015, review here) Katie Doyle's second book in the Vivian Apple series, Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) is commendable for its audacity in taking on the massive issues of mass hysteria, climate change, and the nature of evil in one turbulent series, and for the most part Katie Coyle carries it off. The characters are well-drawn, compelling, and believable teenagers trying to assume leadership in a world where there seem to be few responsible adults.

Many teen readers now flock to post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels and films, responding to a societal dis-ease in which actual conspiracy theories, false prophets, self-absorbed leaders, and fanatic death-devoted religions flourish, make Doyle's tumultuous plotline less a suspension of disbelief than it might otherwise seem. To the author's credit, she does not sink to elevating warfare of one kind or another to the ultimate virtue as do some dystopian warrior sagas, keeping Viv and Harp as savvy, full of life, and indomitable heroines who are lifted by their love and loyalty to their band of rational friends. We can only hope that we adults can deal with these very real problems at least as well. Kirkus Reviews says, "... an exceptionally multifaceted plot, easily seguing from snarky social criticism to heart-pounding action to stomach-fluttering romance, creating a breathless whirlwind that keeps the pages flying until the very end."

Back in '71: One Came Home by Amy Timberlake

So it comes to this, I remember thinking on Wednesday, June 7, 1871. It was the day of my sister's first funeral, and I knew it wasn't her last--which is why I left. That's the long and short of it.

It all began with the passenger pigeons.

They came in unnatural hordes in the spring of 1871, darkening the sky in a sudden avian twilight. People just went crazy. Some huddled gasping in the doorways, dodging the rain of bird droppings that fell, as tens of thousands of birds flew by, five feet above the ground,. Some people grabbed their shotguns and fired wildly into the flock, dropping dozens with one shot. Even Georgie fired her single shot rifle into the mass without even needing her dead-eye aim.

But her sister raised her parasol above her head and ran out into the bird storm, and laughed wildly as the bird stream parted and flowed around her. Laughed and twirled under her parasol, and the next day she went off with the pigeoneers down to road toward Dog Hollow, and a few days after, the Sheriff came back with an unrecognizable, dismembered body, but with red hair like Agatha's, wrapped in what was surely her silk gown sewn with her mother's own stitches.

Georgie is sure that it's not Agatha who is dead. She knows that Agatha left because of her telling Agatha's intended, Mr. Olmstead, that she, Georgie, had seen Agatha kissing Billy McCabe in the twilight, right in front of their house. She'd seen Billy smiling and whistling as he left, and Georgie felt it her duty to tell, but now she feels she's the reason her sister left, and she knows it's her duty to find her sister alive.

But despite her sharpshooting skills, thirteen-year-old Georgie needs help--in particular a mount to carry her on her search--and for that she turns to the only person who has one to spare. Georgie swallows her pride and her dislike for Billy McCabe, who teased and always called her "Fry," short for "Small Fry," and reluctantly accepts Billy's offer of a mule. Arrogantly Billy insists that he has to go along with her for her own good, and since he knows her plan, Georgie has no other choice.

The two set out near midnight, heading for the small railroad town of Dog Hollow, where no one but a taciturn railway ticket seller admits to having seen a red-haired girl, but despite the stubborn mule, a scary encounter with a cougar, and discovering a counterfeiting cache in a cave along the way, Georgie and Billy become grudging comrades, and when the outlaws suspect what they know, it's Georgie who figures out who the counterfeiters really are and rescues the captured Billy with her sharpshooting skills.

I knew what I had to do. I put my right eye to the sight of the gun and aimed the barrel at Mr. Garrow's chest. My index finger wrapped around the trigger.

There's no forward or backward from dead. My own thoughts.

May I remind you that Billy was tied to that tree? Suddenly I saw what Mr. Garrow saw. Bowler Hat swung the butt end of the Springfield rifle into his palm. He walked to Billy and raised the butt end over Billy's head.

I found my mark.

It's not every thirteen-year-old who can shoot the thumb off an outlaw at 300 yards, but Georgie Burkhardt is not your average heroine.  Opening to raves and starred reviews all around, Amy Timberlake's One Came Home (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), went on to take a 2014 Newbery Honor Award. Her Georgie is a funny, smart, and outrageously self-possessed girl who manages to round up the outlaws, locate her sister (enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, studying ornithology all along), sleuths out the identity of the red-haired girl, and help sort out the romantic confusion, including her brief crush on Billy McCabe. History, mystery, wit, danger, a romantic triangle (and even a touch of middle-aged love), and an irresistibly plucky heroine who figures out her own way, all combine to make thisbook a real rip-roaring winner and more than deserving of its silver Newbery Medal.

As Kirkus Reviews says, “Georgie's story will capture readers' imaginations with the very first sentences and then hold them hostage until the final page is turned.”

A Boy, A Pigeon, and the Girl from Savannah: Signed by Zelda by Kate Feiffer

EVERY SIGNATURE HAS A SECRET (LWR #5)

Lucy believed this as much as she believed the sun was hot.

Eleven-year-old Lucy Bertel has a passion for forensic graphology--handwriting analysis. Back home in sunny Savannah, her whole class was into it, but now that her parents have moved her to the big city, into a fifth-floor apartment, there is no one to share her interest. Her new classmates even refuse to give her samples of their penmanship, claiming violation of personal privacy.

In the bedroom above Lucy's is someone who THUMP, THUMP, THUMPS the floor constantly. It's Nicky, also eleven, whose TOA (time-out average) is batting .750 at school and even higher at home. Since his mother left the family, his father's communications with Nicky pretty much consists of four words, "You're in time-out," so Nicky spends most of his time in his room, trying to learn to fly by jumping off his bed and flapping his arms.

Would it make more sense to know that Nicky is inspired to fly by his only friend, Pigeon, who chats with  him constantly from the ledge outside his window? Since his sister Stella seems to want to pretend he doesn't exist and he's in time-out most of the time at school, Pigeon is Nicky's only reliable contact...

...Except for Grandma Zelda, who lives in the apartment above Nicky and keeps him well supplied with Zeldaberry Pie and hugs, along with plenty of stories about her adventurous life and who shares his close relationship with Pigeon.

And then, Grandma Zelda goes missing from her apartment on April Fools' Day. The only clue Nicky can find is a cryptic note, apparently dropped in the hall.

HELP ME.

ZELDA GIBSON

Nicky needs help. First he needs a handwriting expert, and luckily he finds one, on the elevator on the way down, and when Lucy sees the shakily written note from Grandma Zelda, she brings all her forensic skills to solving the disappearance of Grandma Lucy.

Pigeon helps with aerial surveying, and the mystery is finally solved by a seemingly blank front page of a legal pad by the graphology detective Lucy in Kate Feiffer's off-beat semi-fantastical story of a mystery missing person, a talking pigeon, and an unlikely friendship, in her Signed by Zelda (Paula Wiseman Books) (Simon & Schuster, 2012) Known for her picture books done with her legendary artist father, Jules Feiffer, author Kate shows off her ability to spin an absorbing family mystery out of some quirky characters and the sharp forensics of Lucy, with a comforting conclusion that ends with a family-centered flourish. "A quick and steady story for readers who like some substance to their mystery but are not quite ready for the complexity of Blue Balliett" says Kirkus Review.

Feiffer appends a recipe for Zelda's special zeldaberry pie and an intriguing section on handwriting analysis, violas-d'amore, and how she was inspired by the FBI graphologists who helped solve the case of heiress Brooke Astor's allegedly forged will. Clearly, Feiffer is an author with admittedly eclectic interests. Who knows what's next for her?