Resource Links Magazine loves Amphibian

This is a delightful book, humorous yet serious, that evokes comparisons to Mark Haddon's bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Phineas Walsh is a nine-year-old prodigy who is bored out of his mind by the banality of his elementary classroom (unclever teachers, poorly thought-out assignments and self-esteem education receive a vicious lampooning in the book). He's also an obsessive watcher of nature documentaries, and frets constantly over the world's slide into environmental catastrophe. The more the adults in his life tell him not to worry so much, the more he worries. Phin has a special fondness for amphibians, and when his teacher purchases an endangered White's tree frog for the class pet, Phin and his best friend Bird hatch a daring plot to rescue the miserable animal. Meanwhile, Phin has numerous encounters with the class bully, Lyle; drives his mother to distraction; and writes satirical stories about a fictional planet, Reull, where a loathsome overlord species abuses every other life form, threatening the web of life.

Phin is an endearing character, and if his voice sometimes seems a little too sophisticated for a nine-year-old, it's easy to suspend one's disbelief and accept that his high IQ and his linguistic inheritance from his two journalist parents are responsible for his precociousness.