by Moe Zilla

Created on: April 05, 2010

Before he created Ike LaRue, there was an even stranger story from the mind of Mark Teague. (Teague later became famous for books about Ike LaRue, a dishonest dog who types funny tall tales about how unhappy he was at obedience school.) But in "The Secret Shortcut," the exaggerating is coming from Wendell and Floyd, two young boys who are always arriving late for school. As their stern schoolteacher, Mrs. Gernsblatt, points at the clock and demands an explanation - the boys' imagination goes to work!

"They had nearly been captured by space creatures, they told their teacher..."

Teague's story supplies the funny explanations - and then he illustrates them with some wonderful drawings.  (The bumbling space creatures have an enormous spaceship, but they're still waddling clumsily through the neighborhood with what looks like a dog-catcher's net.)  And on the next page Teague explains the boys' tardiness with an even less believable excuse - that the neighborhood was being attacked by pirates. But there's a flashy drawing of the boys hiding in a tree, while the beach below them is prowled by three swashbucklers - two brandishing swords, one with an eyepatch, and one with a wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder.

You can't blame the boys for being late on Wednesday, Teague explains, since unfortunately, they were beset by "a plague of frogs."  (And yes, there's also an illustration of the boys travelling down a frog-infested suburban street.) Needless to say, their teacher was getting tired of the excuses. And that's when Floyd came up with "the secret shortcut."

The secret shortcut looks pretty scary. (On the book's cover, it's depicted with alligators and tigers.) And that's exactly what they discover when they run through a culvert, over a fence, and then through a dense thicket of vines. There's a hippopotamus, a snake, a rhinoceros, and a peacock. "This is some shortcut," complains Floyd.

"Relax," says Wendell. "We'll be there in a minute."

It's a good old-fashioned yarn for children, with strange screeching jungle animals and a forest filled with vines.  There's quicksand, and a swinging suspension bridge, but soon the boys are lost in the jungle. But Teague's illustrations keep the story fun - with a yellow-and red snail crawling past exotic red, tropical flowers, as a monkey watches them from a branch in the trees high above them. Eventually, the boys are swinging from vines too - as an elephant watches from the ground

They eventually arrive at school on time - and the teacher decides it's best not to ask them how, exactly, they ended up getting so muddy. But the book saves its best joke for the end.

"They never did find a really good shortcut."

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.