Frankenlouse
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A fourteen-year-old boy invents a comic-book fantasy world ruled by a book-dwelling insect named Frankenlouse
I am called Nick. I was fourteen the year of this story, the year that changed my life . . .
Nick Reber is a cadet with cartoonist dreams. Nick’s father, a by-the-books control freak, believes his son’s creative aspirations are a waste of time. As commanding officer of Blister Military Academy, he makes Nick march in step—or else. Nick misses his mother, who ran away, although she promised to one day send for him. As a form of escape, Nick creates a whole world inside his head—a comic strip featuring an insect that lives in the pages of Frankenstein. All the other book lice in the library fear Frankenlouse.
But just like Nick, Frankenlouse feels trapped. He wants out of his book, just like Nick wants to escape—until a life-changing decision puts Nick on a collision course with his father.
Narrated in Nick’s distinctive voice, Frankenlouse is about finding your authentic self. It’s a story of friendship, growing up, and the complicated bond between fathers and sons.
This ebook features an illustrated personal history of M. E. Kerr including rare images from the author’s collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nick, the 14-year-old son of the stern, rigid ``commanding officer'' of a military school, hopes to be an artist despite his father and grandfather's expectations that he'll attend West Point. Unknown to his family, he has created a cartoon universe of tiny insects who live off the words printed in books; his hero, Frankenlouse, ``really belonged in a horror library, but his owner had lent him out before he ever got there, so that he ended up among books of poetry, music, art, and literature.'' Nick begins by modeling Frankenlouse on his father, but as the character develops, its personality becomes more and more independent-just as Nick's father slowly realizes that Nick has ambitions and aspirations of his own. Dialogue balloons from the Frankenlouse cartoons are reproduced in the text, and although they do not have the childlike zaniness of Jules Feiffer's hero's work in The Man on the Ceiling, they are fresh and funny. Plenty of subplots and a full cast of semi-eccentrics keep the pace lively and the canvas full. Ages 11-up.
