Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.

(epilogue, author’s note, timeline, bibliography, acknowledgments) Rough types such as Thumbless Jake and Nasty Ned pop up like cartoon villains, but Eel proves too slippery for them, and plenty of best-of-times goodness shines from the murk.Ī solid, somber dramatization of a real-life medical mystery. Snow’s test animals, hides his little brother from their malevolent stepfather at great personal cost and ultimately helps solve the cholera mystery. Eel is a hard-edged softie who rescues drowning cats, tends to Dr. It’s impossible not to like the fictional Eel, who tells the tale in journal form from a first-person point of view, with a convincingly childcentric focus on lovable pets, lemon ice, trust and justice.

Snow in linking the “blue death” to London’s water supply. The Broad Street pump story is a true one, and Hopkinson methodically chronicles the role of Dr. It’s a vile summer in the city: “hot in a thick, wet sort of way, as if the sun were a giant who’d aimed his moist, stinky breath on us all.” Chillingly, the Broad Street pump, popular for its cleaner-tasting water, is dispensing cholera with every push of the handle. John Snow identify the source of a cholera outbreak in the streets of 1854 London. A scrawny 12-year-old orphan named Eel changes history when he helps famous epidemiologist Dr.

The Great Trouble by Deborah Hopkinson