Kid Vs Squid Greg Van Eekhout by Greg Van Eekhout 9781599904894, 1599904896 instant download after payment.

Thatcher Hill is bored stiff of his summer job dusting the fake mermaids and shrunken heads at his uncle's seaside Museum of Curiosities. But when a mysterious girl steals an artifact from the museum, Thatcher's summer becomes an adventure that takes him from the top of the ferris wheel to the depths of the sea. Following the thief, he learns that she is a princess of the lost Atlantis. Her people have been cursed by an evil witch to drift at sea all winter and wash up on shore each summer to an even more terrible fate--working the midway games and food stands on the boardwalk. Can Thatcher help save them before he, too, succumbs to the witch's curse?

With sharp, witty writing that reads like a middle-grade Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Greg van Eekhout's first book for young readers is a wild ride packed with as many laughs as it has thrills.

Grade 4-6 Thatcher is reluctantly sent to spend the summer between sixth and seventh grades helping his great-uncle Griswald run his Museum of the Strange and Curious on the boardwalk of the fictional coastal tourist town of Las Huesas, CA. When a girl, Shoal, breaks into the museum and steals a witch's head, Thatcher pursues her. He soon finds himself in a world of maritime monsters that might just might be plotting to destroy civilization. He allies himself with Trudy, a girl with the tools and the talents of a detective, and eventually with Shoal, to save the world. (The Squid doesn't appear until the end, but it's worth the wait.) Van Eekhout carefully balances his tongue in his cheek with some really creepy situations, and the result is a humorous fantasy that will rush over young readers like a tidal wave. Walter Minkel, Austin Public Library, TX
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Thatcher Hill is a little mortified to be spending the summer with his weird great-uncle Griswald in his superweird Museum of Curiosities on the coast. And things just keep on getting weirder and weirder after a young girl breaks into the museum and absconds with the What-Is-It?? (which might be a severed head in a box, or just a wrinkled old melon). It turns out that she is a princess of the cursed people of Atlantis, who are doomed to spend their winters floating half drowned at sea and their summers hawking schlock on the boardwalk. Thatcher, helped by the princess and another girl, dukes it out with a slimy, scaly, betentacled cast of monsters (controlled by the head in the What-Is-It??) to try to find a way to reverse the curse. The internal logic of the story is joyfully convoluted and not even close to airtight, and although the book is better at being funny than being exciting, it does offer a fair share of both en route to the showdown promised by the title. Grades 4-7. --Ian Chipman