http://www.thestar.com/Entertainment/Books/article/587371 Deirdre Baker


SHEER BUNKUM of an inspired sort fuels Daniel Pinkwater's The Yggysey (Houghton Mifflin, 245 pages, $21.95, ages 10+), a sort of sequel to his earlier Neddiad. It's a "sort of sequel" because, with typical Pinkwater lunacy, Neddie, the hero of the earlier story, can't remember what he did that saved the world, and neither can anyone else.

This is fine because this story is about Yggdrasil rnbaum, resident of Hollywood's Hermione Hotel, "a combination of old Spanish California and the Middle Ages, with some Arabian Nights thrown in," and home to numerous ghosts.

Yggdrasil is used to seeing the ghosts of Rudolf Valentino and prehistoric La Brea woman. They like to hang out in her bedroom. It's when they disappear that she starts to worry. She, Neddie and their friend Seamus do what has to be done to retrieve them: They follow a bunny rabbit ghost down the rabbit hole and end up in New Yapyap, where crossing the river Mahakahakakatuk and getting to New Old Hackensack and a ghostly, "supernatural whoop-de-doo" proves to be more than a little difficult.

Pinkwater's deadpan nuttiness is always entertaining, a comic riff on the stranger aspects of human nature and culture. Iggy in Underland? Only Pinkwater could make a merging of suburbia, kitsch-gone-wild and familiar literature sparkle so. You don't want to miss the ectoplasmic fireworks of this underworld.