One day, Parker, a curious and creative sixth-grader who enjoys building things out of castoffs, is rooting around at the junk yard with a friend when they find a bedraggled green hand puppet.
He’s reluctant, but his friend insists that they keep the thing. At home, Parker slips the puppet on his hand.
And he can’t get it off. And it speaks: “You will call me Drog.”
How can this be? How does the puppet resist removal? How can an inanimate object talk? These questions will not be answered in Honolulu writer Sue Cowing’s new short novel, “You Will Call Me Drog.”
The reader does, however, encounter a pair of by-no-means puppetlike characters: Parker, a bit battered himself by his parents’ divorce; and Drog, a bad-tempered teller of tales in the language and tone that put one in mind of a vain Shakespearian actor.
Drog is, at first, not likeable. The effect on Parker of a permanent green menace nattering from his pocket is uncomfortable and frustrating to witness. My left hand opened and closed involuntarily as I read.
The group librarians call YA (young adult) is difficult to reach, particularly boys. With electronic media, sports and so many other things that thunder, smash and howl, books seem at this hormone-driven age like dull companions.
But a book like this might reach a boy, especially the ending, in which Parker tackles the problem and Drog’s inner pain and yearning are revealed.
The book is both contemporary (divorce, shared custody, stair-step families over which people stumble) and Victorian or Gothic in flavor (Drog’s flowery language, the unsolved mystery). The juxtaposition is as startling and pleasing to the mind as salt on chocolate is to the tongue.
In the end my left hand lay still and I smiled. Here’s an assignment if you’ve got a YA in your life: Trick or coerce him or her into reading the first chapter. They might get hooked, as I was.
