Kirjahaku

This is a rhymed verse novel about a humpback whale lost in the Sacramento River delta, who meets land animals that relate tales of terror from a single species. A raccoon reveals how it came to wear a furtive mask. A heron speaks of poisoned waterways. A frog describes a skin-buckling scene in a land of giants. A dog named Ralf! uses black humor to recount fur-raising experiments done on animals. Then a beaver builds a dam that blocks Humphrey's forward progress. The first people to discover Humphrey are two big game hunters and a 12-year-old girl. Their meeting triggers a contest between advocates for and against the "homicidal humpback." The battle is joined by the Navy and the Coast Guard on one side, and hundreds of rescuers on the other. An Inuit bowhead whale hunter is brought down from Alaska to dispatch Humphrey, while rescuers try to lure him downriver. Then Ralf! returns. This morality tale with a Hollywood ending proves the truth of that old saying, the dog is a whale's best friend.

Far in the future, a teenaged girl named Ellis Antlers is the last person left on Topside, her side of the planet. After meeting the Guardian of Imaginedland and falling through the Earth, Ellis finds that her Topside compatriots have been there first, and all have been brainwashed in the sinister land of Purplevania. With a walrus-mustachioed Anglo-Siberian named Borax Meerschaum, the Prince of Whales and Leader of the Overground; his shape-shifting Golden Retriever sled dogs; and a slightly goofy athlete named Ribs Mgumba, the Congo Kid, Ellis encounters many strange hazards on her mission to unbrainwash her friends. Near the end of Ellis in Imaginedland (or Prince of Whales), Ellis is unsure if she's back in the real world, or still in Imaginedland. And isn't this something everyone can relate to? After all, it's your imagination that takes you on the wildest ride.

This is a book of short, illustrated, rhymed verse poems featuring surprising, imaginary creatures who present ironic and sometimes paradoxical challenges to themselves and/or their imaginary human companions.

A rhymed verse epic of adventure and animal rights