#8 - Flora and Ulysses

Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures
Kate DiCamillo
2014 Newbery Medal Winner
Animal Fantasy

I am a huge fan of Kate DiCamillo.

I believe my first book of hers was The Tale of Despereaux (which is the 2004 Newbery Medal Winner) which I randomly picked out of the book order because I thought the cover was cute.  Or it might have been Because of Winn-Dixie.  I'm not really sure which.  My undergrad reading professor happened to know her because our college was in Minnesota and DiCamillo lives around the Twin Cities.  This is an author who struggled to get published, who still has a shoebox of the rejection letters she received for her books.

I was extremely upset when The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane was passed over for any kind of Newbery recognition because it was just that awesome of a book.

Anyway, I was in Half Price Books with my husband in the spring of 2014 and I saw this book.  Since I love DiCamillo, I picked it up no questions asked.  That spring, I was also taking a graduate level reading class and when I went in for one of our extended Saturday sessions (yes, you may have to give up your Saturdays for grad school, such is life), I found out that the 2014 Newbery list was out and that the book that I had picked up on a whim was at the top of the list.  When I was done with class, I came home and devoured the book.

I know a lot of people have said negative things about this book because it's part graphic novel.  Some how graphic novels have received a bad rap and I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's because they're heavily illustrated.  Some of them are light on content, to be sure, however, there are many which take a large amount of background knowledge to fully understand (The Sandman by Neil Gaiman comes to mind).  I applaud the Newbery committee for not shunning this book just because it's illustrated.

The main character is Flora who lives with her mother and loves to read comic books.  Her neighbor, Tootie, has just been given a very powerful vacuum cleaner and has inadvertently sucked up a squirrel.  Flora resuscitates the squirrel which now appears to have superpowers despite having lost most of its fur.  The rest of the book explores Flora's relationship with her father and mother (who are divorced), Tootie's very strange and temporarily blinded grand-nephew William Spiver, Flora's father's truthsaying neighbor Dr. Meescham and the newly-Christened squirrel Ulysses who is on a quest to find his role as a squirrel with superpowers.

The plot is definitely eccentric but the characters have very real problems that they are dealing with.  You will want to break out your dictionary because DiCamillo does not shy away from using large vocabulary words that even adults may have not encountered.  The graphic novel portions of the book help to carry the plot along and are mostly used in action sequences where the reader could easily be bogged down with an overly long description of what is going on. The graphics actually fit in the context of the book because Flora is a comic book fanatic and because this is essence a superhero book starring a squirrel so it's not like they were just copied and pasted in for no reason.