The Sasquatch Escape

The Sasquatch Escape
by Suzanne Selfors
Recommended Ages: 10+

I got things out of order by reading books 3 and 4 of this series first, but this is book 1 so I guess I'm starting to work that out. I've already met them, but if you do it right, this is where you'll get to know Ben Silverstein – a boy from Los Angeles with a habit of making up stories and boy, some of them are whoppers! He's come to Buttonville for the summer to stay with his grandpa because his parents are having some marital issues. There isn't much to do in a town where most families moved away when the button factory closed. But on his first day there, he and a girl named Pearl Petal, who lives above the Dollar Store, witness what looks like a dragon flying overhad. Nah, couldn't be ... could it?

Then grandpa's evil cat brings home something strange. A tiny, injured creature with wings like a bat, but instead of fur it has scales. And a long, nobbly tail. And it breathes fire. The little thing needs medical attention, stat. But where can Ben and Pearl turn, other than the strange veterinarian, supposedly specializing in worms, who has taken up residence in the abandoned button factory? Maybe, they think, she knows something about baby dragons as well as worms. After all, there's a big dragon living on her roof.

Perhaps disappointingly, they don't get to follow through on what happens to the baby dragon, or rather wyvern, after they entrust it to Dr. Woo and her bizarre assistant, Mr. Tabby. But that isn't to say they don't have an adventure. In fact, they're practically forced into it, when Ben mistakenly leaves the front door unlocked and lets a sasquatch escape. Now the streets of Buttonville are haunted by a strange raccoon that sorts garbage by color, and the nearsighted residents of the old folks' home are visited by a nice doggy who takes an interest in Pudding Day. To hustle the sasquatch out of the old folks' home and back to Dr. Woo's Worm Hospital will call for tons of skill, mainly of the improvisational variety, as Pearl and Ben find creative ways to escape detection by the town's nosiest busybody and her nasty, tale-bearing daughter.

The magic of creatures from the world of imagination has never been funnier and more down to earth than in this book and the series that follows it. Honestly, I laughed the hardest at some of the nonsense that comes out of Ben and Pearl's mouths, like (in this book) a line about taking worms for walks and giving them baths, and (in one of the sequels) their advice to listen for pet worms coughing. Everybody is relatably flawed, and some characters are just bonkers. Like Mr. Tabby, for instance, who has a tail. I'm on board to read all six books in this series, out of order but so what? Next up is The Lonely Lake Monster.