Borgel gets into this thought on the Grand Everything.  Okay, fine.  The “Grand Myth of Scientific Superrationality”.

For the love of Gawd...  Pinkwater is the kind of writer an adult reads in secret. He writes (mostly) for ‘children’ or so I am led to believe. I recall reading The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, thinking then that a child wouldn’t have the mindset to understand the slight nuances.
This probably works for adults as well as children, but it goes doubly for children... you can't just give the audience something that fits squarely into what they already know.  Because that would just be boring.

Books for "Basement Dwellers"... er ... gamers... er... Geeks and Nerds and misfits.
5 Novels.
Nothing wrong with the basement, but get out there and get some sunlight.

Gender issues and children's books and Pinkwater
then I read four books by Daniel Pinkwater . . . the first three, the only female characters were very brief moments of mom, librarian, waitress. the last one had a girl - a girl who could fix cars, hated conversation, and preferred to be alone most of the time. Yeah, NOT a girl, in otherwords.
Heh.  Maybe?
A lot can be written and thought and discussed on Pinkwater and the question of "Yes, but are there Fat Women from Space?"  It does bear mentioning that the dearth of females in Alan Mendelsohn is probably appropriate to the characters in time and space (er... nerds in middle school?), Rat is the type that would come into the orbit in the Snarkout Books... and it's probably not too much of a coincidence that that in the 4 most recent novels, The Neddiad and Bushman Lives seem to me better formed than The Yggyssey and Adventures of a Cat Whiskered Girl... as the main character is a stand-in for Pinkwater at any earlier age.