Poughkeepsie has its share of magic, and Daniel Pinkwater will be the best to know, and is also the city’s most famous advocate. We’ve heard plenty about the marvels of Poughkeepsie in his Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, and other fine works of wonder.
This story picks up not long after the end of Adventures of a Dwergish Girl – presumably in the same summer, as Molly (from across the river) VanDwerg has not yet spent a winter living in her tree behind the pizzeria.
This time we follow the pupil of Guru Lumpo Smythe-Finkel, an unassuming kid who goes by Mick, as he exhaustively traverses the streets of Poughkeepsie with his sandaled teacher, learns how to work the ol’ begging bowl, takes lessons on the ghost flute from a whale, and realizes, from a brief stay in the kind of summer camp with no glass in the windows and no water in the lake, that he will not always be the kind of person who lives in a house where the furniture is covered with clear plastic and the fish sticks are indefinably subpar.
But that’s not really what it’s about.
It never is.
I’ve suspected Pinkwater of being a closet qabalist, an incurable optimist, and an unregenerate vegetarian. I picture him writing the weirdest facts about Poughkeepsie he can find on tiny shards of wood and throwing them in the air, then picking up oh twenty of them in no particular order and making the next story out of them, dealing them out like I Ching stalks in an ever-winding journey, deftly inserting characters we know and love, and lavishing his art on those scenes that make us roll over and waggle our paws. You know. The ones with dancing in a meadow. Or humming. Also, sometimes, popsicles.
All I can fairly say without giving away too much is that I read Crazy in Poughkeepsie once, waited two months, read it again, waited a month, read it a third time and then a fourth right away because it made me feel good.
(Tachyon Publications, 2022)
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This humble author dare not aspire to make the reader feel as good as Daniel Pinkwater can, but with some certainty I can promise that you will enjoy a mighty nice, feel-good story, with one glossy, not-very-detailed love scene, a lot of chewy facts about the secret aristocracy of Chicago stagehands, and a Porsche Targa full of live smelt. Try it.
