The Great Whale of Kansas - Hardcover

Richard W. Jennings has published more than fifty essays, articles, and short stories, including The Tragic Tale of the Dog Who Killed Himself, published by Bantam Books in 1980 to widespread critical acclaim, in addition to his recent titles published with Houghton Mifflin -- Orwell's Luck, The Great Whale of Kansas, My Life of Crime, and Scribble. He is cofounder of a popular Kansas City-area bookstore and former editor of KANSAS CITY MAGAZINE. He has five children, four grandchildren, a dog, a cat, and a parrot and lives in Kansas.

Gr. 5-7. With a tip of the hat to Louis Sachar's Holes (1999) and Oliver Butterworth's Enormous Egg (1956), this odd yet engaging work, more allegory than story, is told by an unnamed 11-year-old Kansas boy who digs a hole in his backyard and finds the fossilized remains of a prehistoric fish. As he digs deeper, he discovers that the creature has been preserved inside a whale--although conventional wisdom has it that whales never lived in Kansas, even when Kansas was underwater. As the fossilized whale is gradually uncovered, its ownership becomes murky. In a convoluted plot twist, some people assume the boy has created fossil art by drawing the fish inside the whale. This causes a sensation, and the state, which had considered the whale a fake, becomes interested again, demanding the fossil and the land around it for a theme park. A court battle ensues, but the boy's Native American friend manages to claim the land by invoking treaty law, and the fossil is ceremonially reburied (sticklers for authenticity may find the ceremony a bit casual). There's almost as much wrong with this book as there is right. The narrator himself says he sounds like a 40-year-old man (a snooty butler might be more on the mark). What's more, the story is wildly erratic--instructive one moment (information on fossils and Kansas), fantastic the next (the idea of a one-boy dinosaur dig). It juggles issues as diverse as the power of the state and the state of the boy's crush on his teacher. Yet it's hard not to be impressed by the ambitious plot and the quality of Jennings' writing, as apparent here as they were in his debut Orwell's Luck (2000). Jennings' best move, though, was building his story around a mysterious gigantic creature and a boy who loves it enough to do the impossible. The slow emergence of this fossilized wonder, a million years away from its last daylight, will captivate children who naturally allow for mystery. Ilene Cooper
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