Leon and the Spitting Image

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Fourth-grader Leon Zeisel has already been branded as lacking fine motor skill by his three previous teachers. With Miss Hagmeyer, a study in black relieved only by “panty hose the color of cooked liver,” it looks as if Leon will never make it to fifth grade. A fanatic believer in the value of sewing as a virtue, she assigns each student the making of cloth animiles, the medieval variant of animals, during the course of a year spent studing the Middle Ages (and the author deftly drops in fascinating information on the period).

Class bully Henry Lumpkin is less euphemistic about Leons’s inadequacies than his teachers are, taking every opportunity to prove Leon the klutz he is. Fortunately for Leon, he has two loyal friends at the school; at home at the one-star Trimore Hotel (host to a revolving assembly of strange guests), housekeeper Maria and coffee-shop owner Frau Haffenreffer join his supportive mother, the night manager, in encouraging the disheartened boy.

Kurzweil’s sense of exaggerated play extends well beyond assigning characters rediculously fitting names. He concocts an outrageous plot as Leon’s animile, a Miss Hagmeyer look-alike, comes alive (through a mysterious combination of spit and panty hose) and causes havoc in school. Kurzweil‘s over-the-top approach is dead-on, fourth-grade funny.

—S.P.B., The Horn Book