FF01_ Fries Alive!

Grade 4-6–It's not easy being a boy genius when your father runs a floundering health-conscious burger joint and your older sister's a deeply annoying wannabe actress. But Freddy T. Funkhouser isn't distressed. He has a plan to win the prize for the best float at the local Founders' Day Parade and bring more attention to his dad's business. To do so, he has constructed five life-sized mechanical fries, each with its own personality. The hope is to bring these kooky creations to life through nanotechnology and a million jiggy-watts of power and then use them on his float. Yet when an experiment involving a dam and a bolt of lightning does awaken the electric fries, Freddy finds his troubles have only just begun. Baldacci, best known for his adult thrillers, is attempting to reach out to reluctant readers by creating a series very much in the vein of Dav Pilkey's "Captain Underpants" series (Scholastic), but for an older audience. Unfortunately, he lacks Pilkey's gleeful silliness and relies too heavily on gross-out jokes and slapstick pratfalls. His attempt to teach kids about the importance of friends and sticking together gets bogged down by poor writing and two-dimensional characters.–Elizabeth Bird, New York Public Library
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Gr. 2-4. Adult suspense writer Baldacci tries his hand at children's fantasy in the first of a proposed series featuring nine-year-old science geek Freddy Funkhouser and his gang of monster fries. Freddy and his father and sister run a failing restaurant called Burger Castle. Freddy's nemesis is bully Adam Spanker, whose family owns a successful burger joint, Patty Cakes. Freddy's fries create unbelievable trouble (wreaking havoc on the baseball field and hitching a ride on top of a moving freight train), but they also save the day (and Burger Castle) in the end. Baldacci's over-the-top action vaults at breakneck speed from one crisis to another, his characters are intentionally stereotyped (somewhat like their television and video-game counterparts), and body orifice humor abounds. While such elements might give adults pause, kids, particularly fans of Daniel Pinkwater, Dav Pilkey, and Steven Manes, will undoubtedly be delighted. An accompanying Web site promises interviews, contests, and previews of upcoming books in the series. Kay Weisman
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