The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis

A book that will appeal equally to boys and girls, this one is chock full of all the good stuff -- friendship, adventure, mystery, humor -- Barbara O'Connor has done it again!

My 7 year old granddaaughter enjoyed this book very much. Illustrations were colorful and the reading level was appropriate for her age.

American children grow up reading so many good British novels that sometimes it's hard to conjure up similar books of a Yankee nature. Maybe that's why I like Barbara O'Connor so much. Fantasy fans are forever searching for the next great American fantasy novel, but I for one am forever on a search for the next great American realistic children's book. And certainly "The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis" probably owes more to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" than "The Railway Children" when you read its plot and cadences. Small and unassuming, O'Connor appears to be honing her craft with each book she writes. This latest is simply one of her best. Boredom comes cheap in Fayette, South Carolina. If Popeye could sell it he'd be a rich boy by now. After all, there's very little to keep him interested this summer. Living with his grandmother and his dog, life doesn't really perk up until a Holiday Rambler filled to the brim with a loud, squabbling, exciting family gets stuck in a nearby mud patch. Popeye quickly befriends Elvis, a boy about his age, and the two decide that what they need is a small adventure. It's simply perfect that such an adventure presents itself to the two when boats made out of Yoo-Hoo cartons start sailing down the nearby creek carrying cryptic messages. Who's sending them? What do they mean? And will the boys be able to solve the mystery before Elvis's Rambler is removed from the mud at last? How do you make a book about nothing interesting? It's sort of the quandary the TV show "Seinfeld" posed when the characters wanted to make their own television show about nothing. "Seinfeld" is about as far as you can get from "Popeye and Elvis" in terms of story and structure, but in both cases they deal with the everyday mundane aspects of our lives. The trick is to stay true to the material and yet still have enough story and character development to make it fun. Maybe Barbara O'Connor has this hidden burning need to write about space monsters and shiny vampires, but somehow I doubt it. At some point in her life she realized that she had a gift. She makes ordinary folks heroes in very human ways. Ms. O'Connor has other gifts as well, mind you. For example, she is an exemplary example of economy in writing. I've always sort of believed that the less words you use, while still staying on point, the better writer you are (which makes these gigantic reviews I write all the more ironic, I guess). If you look at easy readers you realize that folks like Dr. Seuss and Arnold Lobel had a gift. Early chapter books are just as hard, in some ways. You can't spend pages and pages talking about motivation. Character and personality has to be shown, not told. Here's a brilliant example, with three characters introduced at once, with not a single word out of place: "Popeye needed Velma to not crack up because no one else in his family was very good at taking care of things. Not his father, who lived up in Chattan