From My Reading Chair…
“I feel like sugar-frosted lightning bolts.”
Excuse me, Vlad (and Barrager), not you just casually describing the all-consuming fizz of hyperfixation more accurately than almost any book I have read in a loooooooooong time!
As a neurodivergent Witch, I reeeeeeally related HARD to Vlad’s overwhelming obsession with a thing. (Cough, cough... building an entire digital Manor by myself....) That feeling of discovering something that lights up your entire brain, body and being is incredibly difficult to put into words, yet Brigette Barrager captures it in one gloriously specific sentence.
There is so much playful wordplay tucked into the story too, from the character names to the language surrounding Vlad’s world. Barrager understands that a well-placed pun or two gives the story its own vocabulary and makes Vlad’s delight feel even more infectious.
I also really connected with the tension between Vlad’s complete disinterest in traditional learning, desk-based rote regurgitation and the way his entire being ignites through skating. He is not disengaged from the world around him. His brain simply needs a different route into it. A route with wheels, it turns out. (Do NOT get me started on the archaic education system and the testing processes we are still forced to adhere to centuries after their creation, despite living in a world that no longer resembles the one they were built for. Grrrr!)
Barrager’s illustrations give that route glorious visual momentum. Her character work is lush, while the larger double-page spreads give Vlad’s skating room to gather speed across the page and our beady little peepers plenty to follow. They carry so much of the energy, personality and movement that draws you into his sugar-frosted world.
Then comes the final museum sequence, with Vlad skating down the dinosaur and woolly mammoth displays to MUCH applause. The very space associated with the kind of learning that failed to engage him becomes the stage on which his own way of moving through the world is finally celebrated. YES, VLAD!
I would happily have spent even longer inside his internal journey (unfortunately VERY relatable), but that final payoff gives his enthusiasm somewhere wonderfully public and triumphant to land. Literally.
A playful read for little monsters who love skating, live wholeheartedly inside their interests and know exactly what it feels like when a new obsession electrifies their entire brain!
Creep On Reading, Pumpkins!