The Getaway
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Fingers McGraw is the sneakiest cheese thief in town. He's on the run with the law on his tail and he needs you to help him make his getaway! Keep a look out for the big eyes, large feet and long nose of officer Elephant as you follow Fingers' trail through downtown New York and remember, even the best look-out can fail and even the sneakiest of thieves get caught...or do they?
From the New York Times bestselling creator of Max the Brave, Ed Vere
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The "notorious cheese thief Fingers McGraw," drawn as a pale-pink rat in a bandit mask, absconds with his favorite dairy product in this mixed-media spoof of the hardboiled genre. His nemesis is "ace lawman detective Jumbo Wayne Jr.," a stern elephant in a bobby's blue-black gear (this book originated in the U.K.), and Fingers enlists readers' help in avoiding capture. Expository captions, printed in an uneven typewriter font, chart the crime Dragnet-style: "11:00 a.m. It's a race against time." Colored voice bubbles, superimposed on photographs of gritty sidewalks, give Fingers's perspective. "Hey, kid! Yeah, you! Listen, you gotta do me a favor!" the rat hisses, whizzing by on a yellow moped. In an adult-friendly homage to Bogart and Bacall (almost certainly unappreciated by children), he instructs collaborators to signal if they see an elephant: "You know how to whistle, don't you? Just put your lips together and blow!" During the getaway, two flat gray feet imply the jig is up but a turn of the page reveals a rhino. A long flexible schnozzola sniffs out the rat but the nose belongs to an anteater. Vere (the Tag-along Tales board books) takes his cues from the photos-plus-comics sequences of Mo Willems's Knuffle Bunny and from the mock-na ve magic-marker drawings and collages of Lauren Child. Newspaper-clipping endpapers supply a backstory and postscript, reinforcements of the book's old-fashioned cops-and-robber parody. Ages 5-7.
