The Education of Robert Nifkin<\/a>. <\/p>\nI am telling you about Pinkwater because I think that he is a genius, whose writings are easy to miss, because they are filed in the YA (young adult) ghetto. It is difficult to explain the charm of a Pinkwater novel; charm does not lend itself to analysis. As the old expression has it, it is like trying to fluoroscope a ghost…. We all look for reflections of our own experience of life in fiction, and in Pinkwater’s books, complete with aliens, talking animals and weird relatives, almost everyone finds it….<\/i>
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I wish I could’ve read Pinkwater as a youth. When I first read The Snarkout Boys & the Avacado of Death it was around 1981 and I was on my second or third bookstore clerking job. It reminded me of a favorite book read as a young alienated fourth-grader; Bertrand R. Brinley’s The Mad Scientist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,23,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-childrens-books","category-coollinks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/buckets\/programs\/wesat\/pinkwater200.jpg\")
I wish I could’ve read Pinkwater as a youth. When I first read The Snarkout Boys & the Avacado of Death<\/i> it was around 1981 and I was on my second or third bookstore clerking job. It reminded me of a favorite book read as a young alienated fourth-grader; Bertrand R. Brinley’s The Mad Scientist Club<\/i>, a wild adventure about a gang of geeky kids from Mammoth Falls, Wisconsin, who turn their hometown upsidedown. I first read Brinley’s anarchistic stories as they were serialized in Boy’s Life,<\/i> a kind of oversized shaggy newspaper for the boomer crowd. But the Snarkout Boys<\/i> went further, and was more subversive then any so called “Young-Adult” novel I’d read before. It was like a glowing scrap of alien spaceship, new, revolutionary reading… <\/p>\n