Cold Cereal (Adam Rex)

Cold Cereal
The Cold Cereal Saga, Book 1
Adam Rex
Balzer + Bray
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Humor
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Scott's life started off on the wrong foot when his struggling actor father vowed to name his soon-to-be-born son after the next job he got... thus his full name, Scottish Play Doe. (Though to be fair, his kid sister, Polly Ester, named after the fake plant in the hospital waiting room, didn't get off much easier.) Then his dad's career took off; the rest of his family only sees him on screens big or small anymore. Now his scientist mother has landed a job with Goodco, the cereal megacorporation whose sugary products start countless children's mornings, which requires the family to move to the company town of Goodborough and the kids to start all over at yet another school.
When he sees a bunny-headed man on the way to classes, Scott just knows his first day will be even worse than expected.
He's seen odd things all his life, usually precursors to migraines. Only in Goodborough, the hallucinations seem awfully persistent... and disturbingly real. Then he crosses paths with the leprechaun who calls himself Mick, a fugitive from Goodco's factories, and things get even weirder - and more dangerous. It turns out that the company slogan - "There's a little magic in every box!" - isn't just ad hype. Goodco has been capturing fantastical beasts and beings and stripping their magic for its products. Now Scott and his new friends, the siblings Erno and Emily, may be the only ones who can stop a diabolical plot from coming to fruition.

REVIEW: I really enjoyed Rex's The True Meaning of Smekday, and found myself again in need of an audiobook to keep work somewhat tolerable (an increasingly tall order), so I decided to try this one. Like Smekday, Cold Cereal strikes a brilliant, tricky balance between silly and serious, with characters and situations that have a little more to them than one might expect, weaving in elements of faerie lore, the King Arthur myth cycle, and secret societies, plus a dash of corporate corruption. There's plenty of humor, but also a strong dark element running under parts of the tale, as fairy tale creatures are hunted down (and not just in the "catch and cage" sense; Scott's visit to a trophy room, while bloodless in text, implies a whole mess of death and violence under the surface, not to mention what it says about the sociopathic Goodco employees and executives whom he crosses paths with). This weight adds some nice depth to a story that could've easily been superficial candy fluff; kids' lives and relationships can be complicated, even without megalomaniac magic-stealing cereal companies plotting global domination, and Rex's story respects his audience by acknowledging that complexity. Everyone's authentically flawed, even the grown-ups, who aren't completely shut out of the story (as they sometimes are in middle-grade titles - Scott and his friends obviously take the lead, but adults are part of the process, too, and not just clueless lunkheads who mess everything up because Too Old), which takes a little bit of time to build momentum but moves pretty fast once it gets going. The ending, naturally, sets up the next installment, which I will have to track down sooner rather than later. My main complaint is that the audiobook narrator wasn't the best I've heard, particularly his tendency to drop his voice to mumbles or whispers or raise it high and squeaky; as I've mentioned, I usually listen to audiobooks at work, which is a large, loud warehouse environment not conducive to hearing mumbles or whispers or high, squeaky dialog. (I really, really preferred the woman who read The True Meaning of Smekday...)

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