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xterminal's review
2.0
Rosemary Wells, McDuff Comes Home (Hyperion, 1997)
The McDuff stories are big juju among my wife's family. (My wife explained it to me as “my mom always wanted a Scotty” at one point.) I'd never heard of them before the bean came along, but the first time Grandma took him to the library, they came home with a fistful, two of them from the library's ongoing used book sale, three taken out of the library. As far as I could tell, McDuff Comes Home was the second of them, chronologically. After the events of McDuff Moves In, McDuff gets caught up chasing a rabbit, loses his collar, and is found by an inquisitive gardener who takes off through the city looking for his home. From my standpoint, I had the same problems with this one I had with the other books in the series—some awkward language, an odd/inchoate feeling of anachronism given the setting of the stories (they're set in the fifties, which makes me unable to help comparing them with the Beany Malone books)—but the real killer here was the bean's reaction. He likes a couple of the books well enough, tolerates a couple of the others, but it took us seven or eight attempts to get through this one the first time; he would hear the first words of page one and have an immediate, sometimes violent, negative reaction (i.e., the book went flying across the room more than once). Not one that will be coming home with us again. **
The McDuff stories are big juju among my wife's family. (My wife explained it to me as “my mom always wanted a Scotty” at one point.) I'd never heard of them before the bean came along, but the first time Grandma took him to the library, they came home with a fistful, two of them from the library's ongoing used book sale, three taken out of the library. As far as I could tell, McDuff Comes Home was the second of them, chronologically. After the events of McDuff Moves In, McDuff gets caught up chasing a rabbit, loses his collar, and is found by an inquisitive gardener who takes off through the city looking for his home. From my standpoint, I had the same problems with this one I had with the other books in the series—some awkward language, an odd/inchoate feeling of anachronism given the setting of the stories (they're set in the fifties, which makes me unable to help comparing them with the Beany Malone books)—but the real killer here was the bean's reaction. He likes a couple of the books well enough, tolerates a couple of the others, but it took us seven or eight attempts to get through this one the first time; he would hear the first words of page one and have an immediate, sometimes violent, negative reaction (i.e., the book went flying across the room more than once). Not one that will be coming home with us again. **
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