FROGENSTEIN

A lonely middle schooler literally makes a friend.

Watkins pairs miserable young Angus with Frank, a science-class frog who, upon being taken home for the weekend, dies on the family dinner table. Angus gets to work, and next morning Frank wakes up with a bolt through his neck…and a grouchy disposition: “You’ve brought me back, but who gave you permission? / My body was old, I’d lost most of my vision. / Now everything hurts even more than it did. / I was not in the mood to wake up to you, kid.” Still, Frank agrees to stick around as a permanent houseguest (being apparently unmissed back at school), and the stage is set for a final family gathering featuring a grown-up Angus and another frog topped (natch) by a tall hairpiece with a wavy white stripe. Readers who sucked up Giracula (2019) and found it wanting aren’t going to leap to embrace this second nonsensical, poorly written outing either, Watkins having forcibly wrenched many of the lines into verses: “The laughter started at table five, / And reached poor Angus, who started to cry. / His parents were wrong—this school was no different / Than those in the previous cities he’d lived in.” Angus and his parents register as White, but in his cartoon illustrations, Tuchman does vary skin tones slightly in class and crowd scenes. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 77 % of actual size.)

A frankenfailure.