I was going to do a big Sachar post, but realized it would get…erm, unwieldly. Going to seperate Marvin and the Wayside kids up!

Marvin Redpost

When straining the ol’ cranium for books I was reading in the nineties, an image wafted before my eyes and disappeared into the breeze. It was a boy with with red hair, and a ….red fence. No, A red post! Marvin Redpost. I couldn’t remember much of anything except the first book involving Marvin thinking he was an abducted royal prince, but that was enough to induce ebay and Amazon to begin burping up book titles.

Abducted at Birth begins the series, with poor Marvin forced to scour the news for an article to share with the class. He learns of a royal prince who was abducted at birth — his same age, with his same red hair and blue eyes. No one else in his family has red hair and blue eyes. Maybe he was switched at birth! Writing down a phone number from a TV ad, Marvin calls the King and arranges for a blood test — but interestingly, when he’s a possible match (very possible, he has O- blood) and is sitting for a more in-depth HLA test, he decides he couldn’t possibly be the abducted prince because he doesn’t speak with the king’s funny accent. Reading this as an adult I was mostly amused by his parents’ deciding to play-take him seriously. Marvin was lucky to have parents with such good senses of humor.

Alone in His Teacher’s House sees Marvin, regarded by his teacher as responsible, asked to feed and walk her dog while she’s on vacation. Sachar has a little fun with the mystique kids have (had?) for teachers — he’s surprised to find her living in a normal house, and acting like a normal person. Unfortunately for Marvin, her dog is rather old and will go on to that great prairie in the sky during his tenure, leading to constant anxiety and fear because he has no way to tell her — she didn’t leave a phone number!

Marvin and the Class President (1999) is not about Marvin deciding to run for class president, as you might expect, but rather his classroom being visited by the president, who wants to talk to the class about being good citizens. The students are asked to give him questions (why, no, we’re not getting into another war soon, I never heard of al-Queda), and there’s a televised event. Marvin is so distracted by all this he forgets he was supposed to go shopping with his mom, and gets fussed at until they see him on TV with el presidente. I don’t think I read this one as a kid: I would have remembered having to look in the dictionary to find out what a “bar mitzvah” was.

Is He a Girl? is a silly little story about Marvin being told by one of his female classmates that he’ll turn into a girl if he licks the outside of his elbow — which he doesn’t believe, and yet keeps sneakily trying to do, out of the same curiosity that leads us to touching wet paint. After he gets tangled up his sheets, he accidentally does kiss it, and then tosses and turns all night having dreams about going to school and realizing he’s in a dress, that sort of thing. When he does go to school, he keeps interpreting any thought and feeling through the lens of “AM I TURNING INTO A GIRL” — growing paranoid if he notices a girl’s hairstyle as being cute, or wondering what different styles would look like. These days the book would be read far more differently, of course, instead of Sachar having fun with stereotypes about girls being smarter, that sort of thing, as well as mocking the superiority complex that both boys and girls have at that age. (And which persists in some adults!)

Why Pick on Me is….well, it’s a kid’s story. Marvin is accused of picking his nose, is subsequently bullied by it — doubly insulting because his two best friends know he didn’t pick his nose but are going along with it because they’re cowards — and then figures out a way to turn the tables.

The Redpost books were extremely light reading, to say the least, and not as complete fun as the Wayside books, but I appreciated Marvin’s character, especially his befriending the class pariah after he began stressing out over who he himself was.