THE MEANWHILE ADVENTURES
by Roddy Doyle & illustrated by Brian Ajhar
Jimmy Mack, when are ya comin’ back? This silly endeavor, the companion to Doyle’s The Giggler Treatment (2000) answers this question and others—such as what happens when loopy Mister Mack invents a saw that resembles a machine gun and where’s Billie Jean Fleetwood-Mack gotten to. Filled with mostly uninspired lunacy, there’s probably enough grossness, illogic, non sequiturs, and irrelevant sidebars here, woven together with lots of meanwhiles, to entertain your average middle-grader with a short attention span. Going off on tangents seems to be this author’s road to humor, but will your average middle-grader, especially one with a short attention span, follow him down this Irish road long enough? Hard to say. Meanwhile . . . the illustrations are amusing. (Fiction. 9-12)