Dodger and Me (review)

Taking a shortcut home from yet another humiliating baseball game, Willie Ryan comes across a fast-food bag in the middle of the woods. He picks it up only to have it transform into a teapot, out of which emerges a bright blue chimpanzee wearing an eye patch and surfer shorts who immediately proclaims himself to be Willie's new best friend. Despite the strange appearance of his new companion, Willie quickly deduces that any creature who comes out of a teapot must be a genie, and he sets about making wishes to deal with his chief problems in life: an overprotective mother, an overinterested girl named Lizzie, and an overlong losing streak on the baseball field. Dodger, however, only succeeds in making things much worse, as he spreads blue fur and chaos in his wake. Still, by the time Willie finds out that Dodger isn't a real genie but an inferior lackey, he's grown attached to the obnoxious blue chimp, and he must make a hard decision about how to use his last wish. Sonnenblick is writing for a much younger crowd here than he usually does, and the result isn't particularly successful; in trying to capture the attitude of a junior-high boy, the prose often seems written by one, complete with cheesy dialogue over-cluttered with "dude" and "awesome," and slapstick scenarios randomly inserted, relying on wet messes rather than tight comic pacing. The abrupt appearance of the real genie serves to get the plot out of the impasse it reaches with Dodger's antics, but the resolution he brings about is convenient and unconvincing as he behaves against character to help Willie get his happy ending while leaving things open-ended enough for a sequel. Kids who feel generally oppressed by their circumstances will enjoy that it-could-be-worse feeling that Dodger's "solutions" engender, but kids looking for middle-grades boyish humor will be better off with M. T. Anderson, Dan Gutman, or Dan Elish.