A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A short, sweet children's book about Morgan, a young misfit troll who can't decide on an occupation, and his troll community that has strained relations with the nearby human community - a situation not helped by the recognized troll occupation of "foraging" (stealing from humans).

It's a bit predictable and it lacks the intricate farce plotting of some of Krensky's books for slightly older kids, but it's fun and has a number of pleasing touches, like troll gender equality (Morgan's mom is a forager) and fairytales seen from the point of view of the trolls. (Princesses: the best at untangling the knots in troll hair.)

A high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a school election set off a tangle of plots worthy of the Bard himself. Charlie Wilder has stage fright, but gets cast as Lysander as a result of machinations by another student (Greg, currently running for class president) in revenge for a prank Charlie played on him. Charlie’s efforts to escape the role lead to an increasingly complicated web of misunderstandings, romantic entanglements, plots, counter-plots, and counter-counter-plots.

I read this book as a kid and remembered it being really funny and well-structured. Upon re-reading… it is! In fact I’m even more impressed now with the handling of a very large cast in a short middle-grade novel.

My favorite bits were Charlie’s clever plots to get himself fired from the cast, first by being as bad as possible and later by breaking the school rule against negative campaigning by putting up posters after hours with slogans like WHY WAIT? IMPEACH GREG NOW! and Priscilla “Pages” Lodge, who loves melodramatic YA novels and becomes convinced that Charlie is dying after spotting him entering a doctor's office (to try to get a medical excuse to not do the play), and keeps hopefully trailing around him and offering her shoulder to cry on, to his bewilderment.

Pages was reading Don’t Blow This Life, You Can’t Go Back For Seconds, about a wealthy and spoiled New York teenager whose parents are trying to save their marriage by adopting a refugee child every two years. The central character, Alexis, had just dyed her hair purple, so naturally the story had Pages’s full attention.

The Wilder Plot