Chicagoland Detective Agency 6: A Midterm Night's Scheme

(Paperback)

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Description

Help! Just before the science fair, a set of magic potions disappear from Luna's locker! The Chicagoland Detective Agency takes up the young witch's case.

Raf Hernandez knows Megan is odd from the moment she walks into his mom's pet supply store asking for a tarantula. That's weird, but in Chicagoland, weird things happen several times a day. Megan Yamamura is a vegetarian mangareading haiku artist, and she doesn't fit in most places. But she has a good eye for clues and knows when things are weirder than normal. When Megan's investigations get her in too deep, Raf may be the only person who can help and they both might need some help from an unusually talkative dog named Bradley. We did say that Chicagoland is weird ...

Reviews

"Fans of the Chicagoland Detective Agency series have a problem. With each book, the plot gets more and more difficult to explain.

The science-fair projects at James A. Garfield Middle School include a jet pack and a robot that can bag groceries. The students have built every invention that was ever promised by the World's Fair or The Jetsons. The graphic novel feels like a mashup of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and science-fiction comics and everything Robbins watched or read when she was growing up. It has a talking dog and a love potion and snippets of haiku. Some of the plot is borrowed, loosely, from A Midsummer Night's Dream, as the title suggests: 13-1/2-year-old Megan drinks a potion and falls in love with the talking dog. A few readers will find this creepy, but anyone who grew up on Hanna-Barbera cartoons will think it's perfectly normal. The author and the artist must have had a ball throwing new complications into the story, and Page has crammed every possible detail into the pictures of the science fair. The story gets more absurd with every page (by the last chapter, a character has turned into a cat), but the book is still a perfectly credible mystery with a very satisfying solution.

Don't bother trying to explain it to your friends. Just tell them it's hilarious." --Kirkus Reviews

"In their sixth case, the Chicagoland Detective Agency investigates the disappearance of magic potions from young witch Luna's locker just before the science fair and a mysterious stalker who keeps following Luna. But their investigation is complicated when a love potion in Megan's tea causes her to become smitten with talking-dog Barkley. Page's black-and-white line drawings match the cartoony tone of Robbins' comic, most notably the whirlwind climax, which takes place at the science fair, where myriad magic potions cause manic chaos. The happy conclusion finds everyone back in his or her own body and features a matter-of-fact, chaste same-sex romance." --Booklist Online

Author Bio

Trina Robbins established herself during the underground com ix movement of the 1960s, and in the 1970s published the first all-woman comic book, It Ain't Me, Babe Comix, and the anthology Wimmen's Comix. She was a penciller on Wonder Woman in the 1980s, created the series Go Girl! with artist Anne Timmons for Image Comics, has written numerous nonfiction books for children and adults, and designed Vampirella's costume. She lives in San Franscico with her partner, comics artist Steve Leialoha.