Irritating Adventures on Albatross Lane by Bryan (B.L.) Smith

Irritating Adventures on Albatross Lane

Middle Grade; Mystery/Thriller; (Create)

As a newcomer to the small town of Perceval, eleven-year-old Sam Hastings quickly realizes that Bert Mintenko – her bookish, overdressed, stuffed-up neighbour – is the last person she should be seen with. In fact, she decides to avoid him at absolutely all costs. But Bert has a way of stirring up trouble that Sam just can’t avoid. When she starts making friends, there’s Bert diffusing an exploding tuba. When she finally gets to enjoy some independence, there’s Bert getting savaged by a killer goat. And when she just wants a holiday away from everything, there’s Bert causing an international incident. She tries her best to distance herself from the embarrassing tag-along and his irritating misadventures, but when push comes to shove, Sam finds that she has more in common with this awkward oddball than she realized. It’s a good thing, too, because if anybody is going to be able to rescue Bert from a plant-stealing, gun-slinging old lady and her tiger, that person is really going to have “get” Bert Mintenko.

Plot/Idea: 8 out of 10

Originality: 8 out of 10

Prose: 8 out of 10

Character/Execution: 9 out of 10

Overall: 8.25 out of 10

Assessment:

Plot: Eleven-year-old Sam Hastings moves from Toronto to small-town Perceval and quickly finds her next-door-neighbor Bert Mintenko is a social liability, the weirdest kid in town, sartorially hopeless – and also the one person you'd want to hang out with if you crave a life of adventure and mystery-solving. Teaming up with Kennedy, their cool and beautiful computer code cracker classmate, the three friends solve a series of baffling mysteries that have the police stymied, as they simultaneously navigate the still more dangerous rapids of middle school social life.

Prose/Style: Smith writes with considerable humor and great warmth. Bert Mintenko, with his old-fashioned courtliness, his unfaltering kindness and upright nature, his imperviousness to ridicule once there's a mystery to be solved, and his professorial air and his vocabulary that would do a habitual solver of the NYT Sunday crossword proud, is one of the most delightful characters to appear in YA literature in some time.

Originality: Three kids teaming up to do some amateur sleuthing is a tried-and-true formula. But what sets Irritating Adventures on Albatross Lane apart is that its author has created such a bizarrely lovable character in Bert Mintenko that it's all but impossible to stop reading – you just have to know what he's going do and say next.

Character Development/Execution: Sam is an engaging narrator, and her inner struggles between reluctant loyalty to the middle school misfits with whom she has her true affinity and her dogged determination to find acceptance with the cool kids, no matter how boring and vacuous she may think them, in order to escape being teased and tormented herself, will resonate with many readers. But it is Bert Mintenko – the rotund, bespectacled, sweater-vested, eccentric cross between Sherlock Holmes and Luna Lovegood – to whom the story belongs. His sweetness and serene acceptance of the price one pays to be brilliant and to swim unapologetically against the mainstream put the book over the top. Bert, once you've met him, is not easily forgotten.

Date Submitted: August 26, 2021

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