Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder (review)

Tiny, red-haired, smart-mouthed Nilly finds his new home in Oslo, Norway, full of the same bullies and the same jokes about his diminutive size. What's different here are two sympathetic new neighbors: Lisa, a girl whose best friend has just moved away, and a melancholy inventor whose inventions tend to go awry. The inventor's latest, however, shows some potential for the late elementary crowd: trying to invent a cure for hay fever, he has managed to invent a fart powder instead. Nilly is a willing test subject, and the farts are wonderful—outrageous bang with no bad smell. The powder also comes in two strengths, one for louder-than-normal emissions, and one that produces farts so powerful that they can send a body into space, and so long-lasting that they can provide sufficient backdraft for a reasonably slow descent. Naturally, this invention has profit written all over it, with Lisa and Nilly selling the normal stuff to their classmates, and Doctor Proctor marketing the industrial-strength version to NASA. Just as naturally, it attracts the interest of unscrupulous but fortunately sufficiently stupid villains. Norwegian author Nesbo's human landscape, with amusingly caricatured secondary characters played against sympathetic, equally cartoonish protagonists, will certainly call to mind work from fellow Scandinavians such as Dahl and Lindgren, as will the goofy sideplots, featuring an enormous water vole and an even more enormous anaconda inhabiting the sewers under Oslo. Lowery's simple black-and-white illustrations contextualize the story's exuberances by showing the force of the farts and the blockheadedness of the blockheads. Nilly's snappy comebacks to clichés he's heard once too often have a kid-friendly world-weariness that will appeal to the bullied and badgered, and the wealth of potty humor will certainly hit its target audience.