Oct 28 2009
The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Basil by Wiley Miller
Cover via Amazon
As regular readers know, I have long had an interest in both well written and/or beautifully illustrated children’s books and chapter books/young adult fiction. Lately I have been checking out some books that fit in between picture type books you read to your kids and full fledged fiction they read themselves.
One such example, I picked up at a local library sale was Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Basil written by the creator of the Non Sequitor comic strip Wiley Miller. Allow me to steal the plot description from the School Library Journal:
It’s 1899, and 12-year-old Basil lives in a lighthouse on the coast of Maine. A dour, gnomish lad with an oversize head, he longs for adventure. When a balloon piloted by a kindly, mysterious man appears outside his window, the boy leaps aboard and soars off to a fantastic city in the sky. Professor Angus McGookin has brought him to Helios, the home of a secret, advanced society, and Basil is soon caught up in an adventure involving evil scientists, pteranodons, and mechanical armies.
I read the book to my daughter who is almost five years old and she enjoyed it enough to sit still and listen to it over the course of two nights. I found it clever and interesting.
The bright fun color illustrations add some zip and visual excitement to the story. The story itself is certainly not all that unique (boy finds secret world, has been chosen to play a role, bad guy threatens all that is good, etc.) but I found it entertaining and a nice mix of adventure and mystery. There is sense throughout that not only is a sequel in the works but there is a whole lot to the story that isn’t being told.
