Utterly cool read

After having had lashed out at a student, irked by oblivious and obnoxious and selfish individual, worked 7 hours, and bickered about the same issue over and over, I finally got to unwind with a kids lit - Utterly me, Clarise Bean.

Utterly what, you asked? Well, though you may think it's utterly unpopular, it is an utterly good book for the day. I desperately needed something to keep me occupied. Something light, something fun, something with big prints, and something that's utterly brainless. This read is utterly good for today. And I finished it within an evening.

I love the plot. Actually who am i kidding, there isn't any plot in this story. It's basically about Clarise who's crazy about the story of Ruby, who's a 11-year-old daughter of a socialite, who has a secret identity - jeng jeng jeng - she's a secret agent. Ruby receives messages via her bread toaster and messages are imprinted on her toasted bread. Oh, to destroy the message, she has to chow the bread down. Of course, she can choose to slap peanut butter and jam on it or just corned beef. Destroying a secret message has never been this tasty. And Clarise suddenly found herself in an investigative mood after realising that her best friend Betty was missing for a week without a trace (actually, Clarise's dog literally chewed the trace). And oh, there's this book project she had to do with one of the wrecked-up boys from her class because Betty was missing. At the same time, she tried inventing ways to get rid of her slimy brother. And also her grandfather who sneaks into shed in the middle of the night. Yeah, there's a lot going on in the story.

The story is written as such that no analyzing is required. You don't need to muse about why she hates her teacher who behaves like a 40-year-old spinster or why her best friend Betty Moody parents are way cooler than hers. As the story progresses, Clarise, who has recurring habit of drifting in thoughts, rambles about the happenings around her. It's like reading Gareth Owen's Horror Film but in more pages. Pure rambling but with a point (yeah, how oxymoron can this be, right?).

And i love the layouts. The sentence twirls into oval when Mrs Bean tells Clarise that they are running out of eggs. And sentence is arranged in stagger to tell that Clarise is walking down the stairs. And not to mention crazy caricatures and punches of large prints here and there.

It has cool phrases and expressions like:

Absolutely no way, hozay!

I bet he's using my hairbrush, the weasel.

Mrs Wilberton is a hippipotimis.

China is gersquillion kilometres and miles from here.

All in all, i had a good laugh. I'm envious of kids today; they've got utterly cool books like this as compared to my time, when Enid Bylton was like the only 'in' thing. Fairies and elves are cool, but hey, who would have figured that gersquillion is the distance of China from wherever we are.