Reasons not to read this book:

You think kids who are Racecar Drivers

and Secret Agents are boring

Aunts disguised as Uncles give you an earache

You get hives when you read about a bad guy with Half a Face

Backward words and Anagrams give you gas

You're afraid you might split a gut Laughing

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With the help of his aunts and his trusty racecar, undercover agent Otto Pillip sets out to stop a criminal from blowing up the Grand Canyon. Includes words spelled backwards, anagrams, and palindromes.

Otto Undercover #2: Canyon Catastrophe

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By Rhea Perlman

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2005 Rhea Perlman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060754974

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Chapter One

Road Trip

At the very same moment, Otto's Aunt FooFoo was backing an ice-cream truck out of the garage. Aunt FiFi was next to her in the passenger seat, and Otto was passed out in the back. It was the first time he had slept in a week. He had gotten a letter from his parents that said he should keep his eye out for signs of his first mission as a secret agent, and he had been afraid to close it and miss something.

As FooFoo pulled onto the highway,FiFi broke thesilence with her vocal exercises, which consisted of shrieking the note of A-flat over and over. It was the only note she knew.

Otto sprang up, smashing his head on the roof of the truck. His heart was pumping, his eye was oozing, and his head hurt like crazy.

"Did I miss anything?" asked Otto, sitting straight up in the backseat.

"Only all of August and half of September," said FiFi.

"What?!" said Otto.

"She's kidding," said FooFoo. "Aren't you?"

"Beats me," said FiFi.

Otto checked his watch. No days had passed. He'd been asleep for 61/4 hours.

"Where are we going?" asked Otto.

"We're taking you to the beach, Ottie. Your mind is mush, and you need a vacation," said Aunt FooFoo.

Suddenly Otto was fully awake.

"Stop the car!" he screamed. "I'm calling a meeting."

Continues...

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Excerpted from Otto Undercover #2: Canyon Catastrophe by Rhea Perlman Copyright © 2005 by Rhea Perlman. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Gr 3-6 -Otto Pillip loves palindromes, which isn't surprising, given his name. Although he's only 11, he invents all kinds of incredible devices and drives a race car named Racecar. Having lost his parents mysteriously as a baby, he lives with his two peculiar aunts, FiFi and FooFoo. Otto enters a race with a one-million-dollar purse, but, the night before the event, Racecar is stolen by two exceptionally obtuse bad guys. They don't realize that Otto has loaded his car with an invention to defeat every deception imaginable. Perlman (yes, the comic actress of Cheers fame) breaks the novel into tiny, easy-to-digest bits (some of the 36 chapters are only a few words long), which offers the possibility of a fun read, especially for hard-to-motivate readers. Unfortunately, the humor, as well as the story, is mostly lame and repetitious, and Santat's cartoon illustrations add little to the mix. In the second book, Otto receives a secret message implying that if he travels to the Grand Canyon, he might obtain a clue to the whereabouts of his missing parents, so he and his aunts head west. Much silliness ensues involving a crook in a dress, aunts disguised as uncles, 10,000 sticks of dynamite, and a pet cockroach. Like the first novel, Canyon Catastrophe seems designed for reluctant readers, but the gags tend to repeat themselves, the humor involving palindromes and anagrams gets old fast, and the art is only adequate.-Walter Minkel, New York Public Library

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