My fourth grade son loves the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney. And truthfully, so do I. The adventures of a middle schooler who's kid of a loser, told through simple text and cartoony illustrations is a good, fast read, and it gives enough insight into how much Greg Heffley's life really sucks to remind us all that being young isn't all it's cracked up to be. That series has inspired a lot of imitators that I've ignored, but finally there's one that spoke to me--Kirk Scroggs' Tales of a Sixth Grade Muppet.
Released the month before the new movie The Muppets is being released to theaters, it's a book with a similar format to the Wimpy Kid books, but with a different goal--to help kids my son's age learn their Muppets. As a merchandisey tie-in, that's always going to be the goal, but it looks like this will be an ongoing series, with the second book scheduled for next spring.
The plot is centered on Danvers Blickensderfer, a sixth-grader who's obsessed with the Muppets. His favorite is Gonzo, and he models his school projects and his personal life on the stuntman weirdo. He wears Gonzo t-shirts, he sets up elaborate stunts to enter school talent contests, and he would do anything to meet the Muppets someday. I've been that kid, and if you thought it wasn't easy bein' green--it's even less easy being a Muppephile.
Danvers has a dream one night where he's bathed in weird green light, and he wakes up the next morning...a Muppet. He's got spindly, foamy arms and legs, flyaway feathery yellow hair, and a removable round red nose. It doesn't ever explain who his puppeteer would be, but that's alright. Danvers is a Muppet. He ends up on a quest to find out how this transformation took place, and in on this quest, meets his heroes in the flesh--er--foam. Felt. Fleece. Flocking. All those crafty F-words. He meets Kermit the Frog, and Miss Piggy, and Fozzie Bear, and even the Great Gonzo. He's starstruck at first, but soon starts to fit in with them. He's pretty much uninjureable, he starts making horrible (and wonderful) puns, and he breaks into song at random moments. He's a Muppet, alright.
There are other Muppets too, and Danvers needs to get help from most of them at one point or another to piece together the mystery of what happened to him, and how to reverse it--if he wants to. So he visits Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker, meets Sam Eagle, gets diagnosed by Dr. Bob (Rowlf) and Nurses Janice and Piggy, and helps his friends escape from the Swedish Chef. Every few pages, Statler and Waldorf show up to heckle Danvers and the other Muppets. As a lifelong Muppet fan, I was excited to see some of the more obscure characters thrown in--Danvers isn't just chilling with Kermit and Miss Piggy, but with pretty much every character from The Muppet Show.
Tales of a Sixth Grade Muppet has a similar format to the Wimpy Kid books, with cartoony illustrations on every page, with some of the dialogue happening in those panels. Danvers also inserts his own artwork now and then, a little more clumsy than Scroggs' own drawings. The artwork is very stylized, and takes some getting used to, but it's consistent and gets the characterization right, even when the characters might look a little...off.
It's a quick, easy read--I read the 240 pages in less than an hour, and my son is about halfway through the book now. He's liking it, even though he probably doesn't know every character in the book. You don't need to know that Lew Zealand throws boomerang fish, or that Crazy Harry blows stuff up, because it comes out in the course of the story. For people who already like the Muppets, it's a nice adventure with a new perspective. For kids who didn't grow up with them, it's a good introduction to the crazy world the Muppets inhabit. Book Two is about a Comedy Contest, so I'm sure we'll get more Fozzie Bear and other jokesters...I can't wait to see how bad the jokes get.