Lizard Music
By (Author) Daniel Pinkwater
The New York Review of Books, Inc
The New York Review of Books, Inc
15th August 2017
14th September 2017
Main
United States
Children
Fiction
813.54
Paperback
160
Width 131mm, Height 192mm, Spine 11mm
180g
Things Victor loves: pizza with anchovies, grape soda, B movies aired at midnight, the evening news. And with his parents off at a resort and his older sister shirking her babysitting duties, Victor has plenty of time to indulge himself and to try a few things he's been curious about. Exploring the nearby city of Hogboro, he runs into a curious character known as the Chicken Man (a reference to his companion, an intelligent hen named Claudia who lives under his hat). The Chicken Man speaks brilliant nonsense, but he seems to be hip to the lizard musicians (real lizards, not men in lizard suits) who've begun appearing on Victor's television after the broadcast of the late-late movie. Are the lizards from outer space From "Other space" Together Victor and the Chicken Man, guided by the able Claudia, journey to the lizards' floating island, a strange and fantastic place that operates with an inspired logic of its own.
Pinkwater is the uniquest. And so are his books. Each uniquer than the last . . . A delight in oddness. A magic thats not like anyone elses.
Neil Gaiman
No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happymutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has . . . Its one of thosebooks that, in the right hands at the right time, can change your life for the betterand forever.
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net
Lizard Music is . . . funny, properly paranoid, shot through with bad puns and sweet absurdities, and all about a baffled kid intent on tracking reality (as slippery as lizards) in a media-spooked milieu.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Wildly imaginative . . . This is a natural high.
Booklist,starred review
A writer for smart kids . . . Pinkwater writes for, and about, people who are not ashamed to look at life a little differently.
Wired
Daniel Pinkwater has written about one hundred books, many of them good. Lizard Music was almost the first one he wrote, and remains his personal favorite. It is entirely his own work, and the story that it was discovered as a manuscript inserted in a bale of banana leaves, probably to increase the weight, is merely legend, and without foundation in fact.