Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl by Daniel Pinkwater – Review

 You’ve heard of airplanes, biplanes, planes used by carpenters to plane (shave) wood–but, did you know there might be–even many scientists believe there are–different planes of existence?  Big Audrey, the cat-whiskered girl is the main character of Daniel Pinkwater’s latest funny, adventuresome, and mind-bending novel (full of marvelous wordplay and cultural references as usual), The Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Gir.  She is from a different plane of existence, a different dimension that exists alongside, or maybe on top of, our own.

She was first introduced to the author’s readers in The Yggyssey, set in the 1950′s in L.A., a novel about the adventures of a fourteen-year-old girl , Yggy, and her friends to find out where all of L.A.’s ghosts were disappearing to and to rescue them and bring them back to L.A. if they needed, in fact, to be rescued. The Yggssyey is a sequel to Daniel Pinkwater’s first book of his trilogy, The Neddiad. He got the names of these books from the famous poet Homer, who wrote The Illiad about the ten-year war the Greeks fought against Troy its eventual fall and The Odyssey, about the many adventures of the king of Ithaca (an island) and hero of the Trojan war, Odysseus.

Pinkwater is a genius at combining his wild and imaginative flights of fancy with the theories of quantum physics, like that there are parallel dimensions, and in Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, he embarks on some of his wildest–but coolest–flights yet. Big Audrey returns to LA on a bus with Yggy and her friends, Ygygy, Neddie, and Seamus, and finds work at the Rolling Doughnut doughnut store. She decides to go to Poughkeepsie, New York, on the recommendation of a friend of hers and the gang’s, Crazy Wig, who is a vegetarian hippie Shaman who “can see visions and knows things of a mysterious nature.”

Crazy Wig arranges for Big Audrey to travel as a passenger to Poughkeepsie with the actor Marlon Brando, who drives her there in a convertible. This is, I’m guessing, before Brando became a well-known actor, but he always had a somewhat crazy side to his character. Along the way he plays bongo drums while driving and talks about health food. He drives nonstop because they don’t even have to pick up food from restaurants along the road since he “had plenty of fruit, wheat germ, and bean curd in the trunk (and also a dozen large chocolate cakes,” which don’t exactly seem to be “like health food,” to Big Audrey).

In Poughkeepsie, Audrey ends up working at the UFO Bookstore, run by a friendly couple, the Gleybners. They believe that she must be a space alien because of her whiskers even though she tells them she’s from Los Angeles. Big Audrey enjoys reading the books there, but doesn’t discover any that tell us about other planes of existence, though there are lots of them about space aliens, “the abominable snowman, Bigfoot, crop circles, and the Bermuda Triangle.”  There’s all sorts of interesting people who are customers of the store, including the crazy people from the cities’ insane asylum or “loony bin,” who visit on day-passes.

Professor Tag (“Professor” is his first name) is one of Big Audrey’s favorite customers, and “also my favorite loony.” He is an actual professor at Vassar, a nearby college for women. Once a year, he “would go nuts and they would move him up to the loony bin for a while – then he’d get over being nuts and they’d bring him back to teach his classes.” He’d go there for his “annual cure” and then come back out and teach classes again, as if nothing had happened.  It’s while she’s at the loony bin visiting Professor Tag that Big Audrey meets another patient there, a short girl named Molly, who hears voices in her head and is telepathic. She’s not actually crazy, though–she’s a Catskills dwerg, the Dutch word for leprechaun. Molly’s become convinced she must be crazy, because she’s really not, and she becomes one of Big Audrey’s best friends.

Every Wednesday night (and often during the entire week) UFOs land outside a big stone barn where the best apple fritters around are prepared by the owner, Clarinda Quakenboss. The aliens, she tells Big Audrey, Professor Tag, and Molly, pay her in gold. They want to see the aliens’ spacecraft for themselves, and one night see lots of mysterious colored lights in the sky. some seem to be flying around, and maybe going into, a large mansion known in the area as the Spookhuizen (or house of spooks), a haunted house. Later in the book, they try to approach the house, but can never seem to get closer to it, no matter how hard they try, and how fast they run.

Chicken Nancy, a local wise-woman whose mother had been born a slave, is so old she remembers when the disappearing house behind the stone barn was occupied by a wealthy local Dutch family, who made its fortune selling the Van Vreemdeling Kwispedoor, a bestselling spittoon (she also remembers when Abe Lincoln invented the idea of putting cream cheese and lox on bagels). She has in her house a painting she shows Big Audrey and her friends of Elizabeth Van Vreemdeling, who looks so much like Big Audrey that Molly believes it might be a picture of her, or at least, her doppleganger, or double. Chicken Nancy tells them that Elizabeth “was not actually a member of the family. She just turned up at Spookhuizen under mysterious circumstances and wound up adopted.”

Big Audrey is anxious to learn more about her own origins, so she asks Chicken Nancy what the “mysterious circumstances” were, and Chicken Nancy says: “It was said she had come in a flying saucer.” She was also “quite chummy” with the Wolluf, a terrible creature kind of like a werewolf. Chicken Nancy reads the tea leaves of Big Audrey and Molly, and tells them they’re destined to meet the Wolluf, in a castle on Pollepul Island.

They are taken to the island by a friend of Chicken Nancy’s who stops by for a large breakfast of pancakes. He is Harold, a Catskill giant. But he’s probably the smallest giant there ever was, because he’s just 5 foot 7 inches tall. He has a degree in Classical Accountancy from Vassar, and Professor Tag had been his teacher there. Harold takes them to the island in a round-bottomed boat called a coracle, that Big Audrey is very familiar with, and hates, because her Uncle Father Palabra had one, too. They’re very difficult to steer and people riding in them often get spun around a lot and become seasick.

Another evil character Big Audrey and her friends encounter is the legendary Muffin Man. Molly discovers a power she never knew she had when she and Big Audrey are attacked by the Muffin Man–she can summon the demons who live in Christmas trees. They happen to be passing by a Christmas tree farm when a dark fog rolls in and they both smell the tell-tale sign that the Muffin Man is lurking about–the smell of muffins. Molly makes an ear-piercing scream:

And in that moment there were thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of sharp knives whizzing all around us. Fast-moving, making a keen, hard, singing noise, slicing and slashing – I knew these things could cut through anything, and I imagined the burning wounds and my hot blood spilling, but they were not touching us. They were after the big black foggy thing – and it was hurting. I saw, or felt, or maybe heard it twist and shift, recoil and jump, trying to collect itself so it could get away. But they were after it, the thin, quick, vicious things. And all the time, Molly was screaming that ear-breaking scream.

As bad as the muffin Man is, Chicken Nancy assures the girls and Professor Tag that the Wolluf is even worse. The entire novel is a joy to read, and is, in my opinion, the best one of the trilogy, though all of the books in it are very good. There is more dimension-hopping, though, and Big Audrey and her friends have to contend with corrupt coppers, mysterious cherubs, and a very strange secret society called “the Mystic Brothers of the Mystic Brotherhood,” made up of very odd characters who subject them to stuff like “the Trial of Hot and the Trial of Wet.”

Both trials are pretty silly. In the first trial, they’re lowered in a basket into darkness. Eventually, the girls feel things hitting the tops of their heads–they’re being pelted with hot peppers, jalapenos. The Trial of Wet involves the Mystic Brothers squirting the girls with squirt guns.  If you like reading way cool novels that are full of adventure, spaceships, aliens, dwergs, giants who aren’t exactly giant-sized, and dimension-hopping between different planes of existence, you’re sure to love reading Daniel Pinkwater’s Adventures of a Cat-whiskered Girl.  It can be read as a stand-alone novel, and you’ll still enjoy reading it, but I recommend that you read the first two books in the series, because they’re all very fun reads.