The Tell-Tale Start
Series: The Misadventures of Edgar & Allan Poe, Book 1
By: Gordon McAlpine / Narrated By: Arte Johnson
Length: 3 hrs and 14 mins
Li’l charmer, this was!
It’s like this, see…
Big Sis is beYONd awesome, having a keen intellect, a curious mind, and a great big ol’ heart the size of (Is Kansas big enough? …no…?) Texas…
So we’re fairly certain her pick for our little audiobook club will be enlightening even as it engages. All well and good? Nope, actually it’s just this side of FanTAStic.
Uhm, except when said choice comes with downloadable PDFs that are absoLUTEly NECessary in order for even the most BASIC comprehension to occur. Like, you have to pause, glance, cogitate, come back to listen to a bit, pause, glance, blindly grasp at straws all whilst cogitating your brains out, etc etc et freaking cetera.
That our Mom is brilliant goes without saying (New York Times crossword puzzle solver extraordinaire); me? I flail a lot, but I ain’t THAT big an idiot… Turns out? When it comes to certain audiobooks? Dude, I’m a doofus.
So thanks be to GOSH, Big Sis got fed up with her last pick and offered this really charming Kinda Sorta Kids book, The Tell-Tale Start by Gordon McAlpine which our club did so enjoy.
Do NOT listen to the “School Library Journal” when they posit that the twin Heroes of this story are actually mean and petty. Yeh yeh yeh, destructive without. a doubt. But both Edgar and Allan have highly-honed senses of true justice. Bullies who torment the little kids in their school get their comeuppance at Halloween in the Haunted, oh sooo Haunted! House the two devise. They take creepiness to the utmost highest of levels, and they scare the beJESus outta the bullies, giving them a li’l taste of their own terrorizing medicine.
Okay, so there IS the bit about the two being rude to and dismissive of their teachers; but that’s only because they already know so much that lessons are boring. To me, that would be every kid’s dream: It’s fairly harmless to wanna be one up on a person in grouchy authority. And there IS the bit about rearranging the anatomy teaching skeleton, but hey! that’s harmless too. Nobody told THAT particular teacher that he really needn’t take everything so seriously.
This is just good-natured fun, and the basic story is that their much-loved cat Roderick Usher has disappeared. Edgar and Allan, the great great great great grandnephews of THE Edgar Allan Poe, are set on sussing out the feline’s mysterious absence by following clues that they feel Fate sends to them.
And the story’s most enjoyable part is that THE Edgar Allan Poe, tho’ somewhat incredibly dead, is at work on the Other Side, desperately attempting to send Signs and Warnings, going so far as to constantly give the two boys identical fortune cookies. Problem: Communication between the world and the afterworld gets kinda mussed up, and the boys, unbeknownst to them, are led to the right place, but without knowing about the utterly nefarious plot of one evil Professor Perry.
Information is somewhat off, the boys wind up in precarious situations, and literary heroes of yore are characters in this first in what should be a charming series. My only reservation is that it is not, of COURSE, narrated by Alan Cumming. Nope, this has American Arte Johnson do the honors for this American story, and while it’s obvious that he’s doing his darnedest, I just could NOT help m’self: I compared this book with the Kenny audiobooks our little group juuuust listened to. Mr. Johnson, tho’ awesome in “Laugh-In”, truly doesn’t seem to be at total ease with the text, or maybe he’s just trying a bit too hard. About now is when you should clobber me for comparing apples to oranges, and I own it. It’s just that with aaaaallll the mayhem the boys cause, with aaaaallll the crazed youthful hijinks, with aaaaaallll the wicked plots and plans? And with two very well-conceived Heroes? I was expecting more.
I know, I shoot m’self for expectations knowing that: Expectations are just premeditated resentments blah blah I’ll get over it blah.
Precious little story, if you can forgive my whining. And definitely worth the look-see for the second in the series as, tho’ there ain’t no desPICable cliffhanger ending (I’m sending some ire your way, Michael J. Sullivan!), it does indeed conclude with a tantalizing offering. Not enough to peeve, just enough to pique our interest.
Bravo, Bravo! And dude! noooo PDF to download!!!
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