THE ATTACK OF THE FROZEN WOODCHUCKS

Ten-year-old Jimmy Weathers is used to his lawyer-by-day, children’s-book-author-by-night father telling tall tales about the animals in his unpublished books. Then after insisting he saw a giant frozen woodchuck in Central Park, his father disappears. The police are unhelpful. Jimmy knows it is up to him and his best friend William H. Taft the Fifth (great-great-great-great-nephew of the fattest president) to save Dad and, of course, the world. In what becomes an interstellar quest and a battle against giant chucks riding space Vikings, they enlist the help of Janice, an outcast genius in their class, and Jimmy’s two-and-a-half-year-old sister Imogene, a mechanical prodigy. Elish’s first for middle-graders is a foolishly fun mix of the movie Flight of the Navigator and M.T. Anderson’s Whales on Stilts (2005). Some humor about suicide scales up the age appropriateness to a level at which readers may find the candy-based galaxy a bit juvenile, but libraries in search of lightly sarcastic, fantastic fare will be happy with this and likely sequels. Final art not seen. (Fantasy. 10-12)