One of my favorite books of the year is Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures. It is an absolutely fantastical book about Flora, a lover of comic books, whose mother, an author of romance novels, makes her sign a contract to stop reading comics and “turn her face … toward the bright light of literature.” Flora who hates romance books, to say nothing of romance, rescues a poetry writing, super hero squirrel whom she names Ulysses from the next door neighbor’s vacuum and thus begins the book. It is filled with references to her favorite comic series, The Illuminated Adventures of the Amazing Incandesto! They’ve done issues on everything and Flora has a knack of coming into contact with lots of terrible things. Her other favorite comic is The Criminal Element and she considers everyone she meets capable of nefarious deeds.
Flora and Ulysses radiates a joy of words, of finding the right word to express a feeling, as when Dr. Meerschaum surreptitiously teaches Flora the word ‘capacious’ to describe Flora’s father’s heart. It is also filled with lovely, somewhat old fashioned illustrations as well as comic strips by K. G. Campbell that tell part of the story.
The characters include the next door neighbor great nephew, William Spiver, who thinks he is blind. As he says to Flora, “it’s not even that I bump into things. It’s more that things leap out of nowhere and bump into me. My mother says that this is because I live in my head as opposed to living in the world. But I ask you: don’t we all live in our heads?” Among the other great characters is Dr. Meerschaum, doctor of philosophy, to whom Flora brings Ulysses when he’s had a concussion. She is full of non sequiturs, but leads Flora to understand how sad her father is to live apart from her. When Flora tells her she’s a cynic, Dr. Meerschaum replies, “bah cynics…cynics are people who are afraid to believe.” (P. 129)
“Holy unanticipated occupancies!” “Holy begumba” as Flora and her father would say, this is a great book. We couldn’t have a better National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, a position to which DiCamillo was just named and which lasts for two years.
Books Abound 