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The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where TheyWent, and Went There
(Neddie & Friends #2)
by
A sequel to critically acclaimed THE NEDDIAD told from the point of view of Ned's friend, Iggy
La Brea Woman is missing. Valentino, too. The ghosts of Los Angeles are disappearing right and left!
Iggy Birnbaum is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, no matter what Neddie Wentworthstein and Seamus Finn say.
There’s just the little matter of traveling to another pla ...more
La Brea Woman is missing. Valentino, too. The ghosts of Los Angeles are disappearing right and left!
Iggy Birnbaum is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, no matter what Neddie Wentworthstein and Seamus Finn say.
There’s just the little matter of traveling to another pla ...more
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Hardcover, 256 pages
Published
February 16th 2009
by HMH Books for Young Readers
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Start your review of The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where TheyWent, and Went There
Daniel Pinkwater has never let me down. I wish he was my long lost uncle. In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and say something that will prove without a shadow of a doubt how I feel about him: He reminds me of my Dad. Yep, I said it.
My Dad was Google before Google. You could ask him something about anything and he would know something about it. I believe Mr. Pinkwater possesses that same intellect, and he's used that to write hilarious stories that are peppered with factoids. What an absolutely fascin ...more
My Dad was Google before Google. You could ask him something about anything and he would know something about it. I believe Mr. Pinkwater possesses that same intellect, and he's used that to write hilarious stories that are peppered with factoids. What an absolutely fascin ...more
Aug 02, 2009
Agathafrye
rated it
really liked it
Recommends it for:
kids of all ages
Recommended to Agathafrye by:
Carrie, indirectly.
Another classic Pinkwater romp. Yggdrasil, Neddie, and Seamus set off on an adventure to see why all of their ghost friends from the Hermione Hotel have disappeared, and where they have gone. They end up in an alternate reality where kids are randomly rounded up and brainwashed with TV in a hole in the ground, and people do urban mountaineering on buildings, and the police are dogs, etc. etc. My favorite part of the book is when the group finds a community of tiny hippies called Hoopies that fee
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So I was very taken in by the name of the book. I was also drawn by the Neil Gaiman blurb on the cover. What neither of these can account for however is how a kids' book (and not typical young adult, but like 8-11) ended up with the grown up books. This isn't typically a genre I'd read, but I'll do my best to be fair.
To begin with I did enjoy the books. The 2 page chapters and super short sentences took some getting used to, but overall Pinkwater had a good rhythm to things. There are some obvi ...more
To begin with I did enjoy the books. The 2 page chapters and super short sentences took some getting used to, but overall Pinkwater had a good rhythm to things. There are some obvi ...more
This is a fine second installment of the series. I'm not sure I love the idea that Neddie is no longer the first person narrator, but that's no big deal. And while the Pinkwater wacky world generator is going full tilt, it seems very much like an Alice in Wonderland tale. This surely would make a nice movie one day, with all sorts of weird creatures and giant talking heads. I loved the imagery.
Highly recommended as good bedtime reading with kids.
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Highly recommended as good bedtime reading with kids.
...more
Mucho fun! Read this book. (But read The Neddiad first.)
I read a lot of YA during the hot months. It's a thing. I enjoy it. This summer has been FULL of bad-servicable choices on my part- some bad enough to be fun, some perfectly fine, a few just plain bad.
This is none of that. This is a genuinely good book. I feel like a lot of YA is written about precocious kids by people who either were not, or do not remember what it was like to be precocious children. This kid, however, is an entirely believable precocious child. When reality doesn't make sense ...more
This is none of that. This is a genuinely good book. I feel like a lot of YA is written about precocious kids by people who either were not, or do not remember what it was like to be precocious children. This kid, however, is an entirely believable precocious child. When reality doesn't make sense ...more
The second in Pinkwater's, as of now, trilogy, nestled between "The Neddiad" and "Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl", this book does not have the nostalgic drive of the first oe or the sheer mania of the third, but it is still a lot of fun.
Daniel Pinkwater is a national treasure and his value to parents of kids moving through grade school, as someone who is funny and intriguing to such a wide variety of maturities, is beyond measure. ...more
Daniel Pinkwater is a national treasure and his value to parents of kids moving through grade school, as someone who is funny and intriguing to such a wide variety of maturities, is beyond measure. ...more
I like the characters, and the narrator's snarky voice! It's set further in the past than I remembered, although I do remember the stucco restaurants being a thing in the first book as well. This one's got a lot of ghostly activity, and manages to have a fairly cohesive plot, although the action swerves every couple of chapters to introduce new characters and locations. Good for those who are easily bored, I would say!
...more
Well. That was weird.
It’s got a lot of the elements that I love in Pinkwater books. I felt like the book was hurried, that it didn’t give itself time to dig into the world or build up the tension.
Sequel to the Neddiad. Another weird book.
Oct 15, 2019
Madeline O'Rourke
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
library-reads
The Yggyssey had big shoes to fill following The Neddiad. Though I didn't love this book as much as its predecessor, it was still a fun time and wonderfully absurd.
I love that the ghost lore in this series has no rules or explanations. It's very consistent in its inconsistencies—which is probably a good way of describing this book as a whole.
I like that The Yggyssey took that relatively unexplored element of The Neddiad—ghosts—and explored it. In spirit and style the novels are, of course, simi ...more
I love that the ghost lore in this series has no rules or explanations. It's very consistent in its inconsistencies—which is probably a good way of describing this book as a whole.
I like that The Yggyssey took that relatively unexplored element of The Neddiad—ghosts—and explored it. In spirit and style the novels are, of course, simi ...more
This book was the sequel to Pinkwater's "The Neddiad". While this book wasn't as hilarious and quirky as "The Neddiad" it was still a great read.
Iggy is wondering why the ghosts that live in the hotel her and her parents permanently inhabit are disappearing. With the help of the main characters from the Neddiad (Neddie and Seamus) she tries to find out. As with the Neddiad the path to the answer is funny, not at all straight-forward, and full of general craziness.
I was excited that this book was ...more
Iggy is wondering why the ghosts that live in the hotel her and her parents permanently inhabit are disappearing. With the help of the main characters from the Neddiad (Neddie and Seamus) she tries to find out. As with the Neddiad the path to the answer is funny, not at all straight-forward, and full of general craziness.
I was excited that this book was ...more
Feb 27, 2015
Naseer Karim
added it
The book yggyssey is a very odd book in my opinion it has a very unique storyline. This girl named Yggdrasil other known as iggy and she lives with ghosts. There is her pet bunny who is telling her about a place where all the ghosts go. She decides that she has to get down to the bottle of where the ghosts all disappear to. As iggy takes this journey into all these mysterious places to find where all the ghosts go. She brings along a few friends and face a few difficult challenges along the way
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Iggy is in a city full of ghosts, he lives in a hotel in Los Angeles and thinks of the ghosts as nothing significant. Her friends Neddie and Seamus are all for the ghost life as well, and these three friends make a great team on the adventure that begins throughout this story.
The three friends go to two different schools, Iggy is at one where there is "no stress" allowed. Anything and everything is boring and everything is optional. This is the life Iggy lives, and it is anything but extraordi ...more
The three friends go to two different schools, Iggy is at one where there is "no stress" allowed. Anything and everything is boring and everything is optional. This is the life Iggy lives, and it is anything but extraordi ...more
The Yggssey by Daniel Pinkwater is the sequel to The Neddiad. As the Greek inspired title implies, this book follows Iggy, aka Yggdrasil. She is the girl who lives in a hotel haunted by Hollywood movie star ghosts. She's noticed now that the ghosts are going missing and she decides to figure out why they're leaving and where they are going.
If The Neddiad was Pinkwater's Iliad, or more specifically, a long on-going war, ultimately decided not by a horse but a turtle, then The Yggssey is the autho ...more
If The Neddiad was Pinkwater's Iliad, or more specifically, a long on-going war, ultimately decided not by a horse but a turtle, then The Yggssey is the autho ...more
In this wacky sequel to The Neddiad, Yggdrasil Birnbaum (Iggy for short), and her friends live in the residential Hermione Hotel, talking and hanging out with movie stars, cowboys, and ghosts (famous and not so famous). When Iggy’s ghost friends start to disappear, she wants to know why. In this parallel of the Odyssey, Iggy and three friends follow her ghost bunny friend, Chase, through a portal into a zany underworld full of familiar and unfamiliar characters from myths and fairy tales.
Pink ...more
Pink ...more
I never reviewed this when I added it to my list here, but I have notes I made at the time I read it:
I liked how Pinkwater shamelessly exploited his knowledge of Yiddish to create a bunch of funny insider jokes. For example, in the second book there is a Nisei character named Ken Ahara who is studying ghostology. (His name sounds like a common Yiddish expression for averting the Evil Eye--his advisor is Professor Malocchio.) Kid A liked it that people said "Bupkis!" Really there were a lot of f ...more
I liked how Pinkwater shamelessly exploited his knowledge of Yiddish to create a bunch of funny insider jokes. For example, in the second book there is a Nisei character named Ken Ahara who is studying ghostology. (His name sounds like a common Yiddish expression for averting the Evil Eye--his advisor is Professor Malocchio.) Kid A liked it that people said "Bupkis!" Really there were a lot of f ...more
A bit stranger (somehow) and shorter than the Neddiad (at least it seemed like it) and there seemed to be a number of things unresolved by the end. Not sure if Pinkwater had intended to write a trilogy of books when he started writing the Neddiad but this book has some of the makings of a middle story. Very funny, very strange with lots of weird bits of pop culture thrown in for good measure and quite a bit more sarcastic than the first book, owing to the book being narrated by Yggdrasil aka Ygg
...more
So, apparantly I have gone and read another book that is a sequel without reading the book that comes before it again. That is ok, you don't have to have read the prior book to enjoy this one. Written for children in grades 4 to 9 or so, this is a cute and funny book about Yggdrasil Birnbaum who lives in a haunted hotel and goes on adventure to find out where her ghost friends have been disappearing to. Set in LA in the early 1950s with the ghosts of Rudolph Valentino, LaBrea girl , Chase, the g
...more
So SILLY! Iggy is the child of an old-timey movie star and a psychiatrist who believes in letting kids do whatever they like. She lives in an old Hollywood hotel that is full of ghosts. Her friends, who attend a military academy, also are friendly with ghosts. When the kids notice the ghosts are all disappearing they follow a ghostly bunny into an alternate universe that seems a lot like New Jersey, except for the evil witches and mean dictator. The kids battle evil, relate lots of information a
...more
It was no Lizard Music, but it was pretty charming.
A difference from the other Pinkwater I’ve read was that this was self-consciously historical, taking place in the he ’50s instead of a vague present-day-at-the-time-of-publication. Wait, no, come to think of it, The Education of Robert Nifkin was historical too. But there’s, like… Well, insert thought here about portal fantasies having more tooth when they’re set in a contested present day rather than a past that has already been rendered safe, ...more
A difference from the other Pinkwater I’ve read was that this was self-consciously historical, taking place in the he ’50s instead of a vague present-day-at-the-time-of-publication. Wait, no, come to think of it, The Education of Robert Nifkin was historical too. But there’s, like… Well, insert thought here about portal fantasies having more tooth when they’re set in a contested present day rather than a past that has already been rendered safe, ...more
This sequal to the Neddiad brings back the same weird kids, but is narrated by Iggdrasil Birnbaum rather than Neddie. Iggy was actually a more interesting character in the first book. Her oddities were more pronounced as a secondary character occassionally setting Neddie and Seamus straight than they are telling her story, which turns out to be a bizarre version of the Wizard of Oz. This book is also shorter on the quirkiness of post-war LA that ran through the Neddiad. All the weird places like
...more
Recommended for gr. 5-8. Sequel to The Neddiad by Pinkwater. Minor references were made to The Neddiad, but as far as I could tell, no previous knowledge was needed to enjoy this story. In this humorous fantasy set somewhere in the 1940's, Iggy (short for Yggdrasil) is friends with a number of ghosts, several of them famous people, who live in her apartment building in Los Angeles. With the help of two friends, she travels to an alternate reality to discover where the ghosts have been disappeari
...more
A fun addition to the story begun in The Neddiad. This one I didn't love quite as much, since it didn't have as much about Los Angeles in it (though it did have some, in the beginning especially), and I kept forgetting that Yggy was the protagonist/narrator. She didn't seem as differentiated from the narrative voice of Neddie as I would have expected and liked. Nonetheless, Pinkwater is fabulous and I would snap up another of his books in a heartbeat. No one else can write about labrador retriev
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Yggdrasil Birnbaum (you can call her Iggy, but she won't like it) and her friends find that the only thing that makes 1950's Los Angeles tolerable is the large ghost population. But when the ghosts start disappearing from the very haunted residential hotel where Iggy's family lives, she decides to follow them to another existential plane, where there's a big ghost party (ghosts will go anywhere for a good party). Along with her pals Neddy and Seamus, she finds more than she bargained for on anot
...more
This was a great Pinkwater romp through his always engaging twisted mind. It seemed a little sloppy in spots though - it was never shown why Iggy ws BFFs with Chase, the ghost bunny rabbit, I never believed that the main character was female, and some tertiary characters kept being introduced as though they were new to the story, I also got tired of the reference to something big that happened in the prequel to this book, which was never explained, just referenced to death. My favorite thing abo
...more
This is the perfect follow-up to the Neddiad. It is a little shorter and easier to read (with shorter chapters) but it still packs in all the fun and wierd, wonderful adventure. It takes a pretty much completely different route than the Neddiad did, and only refers to the other book once in a while (so you can not have read it and still read Yggyssey). Refreshing, intelligent, and funny. I learned lots of interesting things, like who invented the smoothie. Plus, any book that prominently feature
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Where The Neddiad was (kinda, sorta, mostly) set in the real world, The Yggyssey (How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There) starts in the same world, but quickly moves to a parallel, more surreal world where Iggy, a young woman introduced in the first book, makes a perilous, episodic journey (much like, say, The Odyssey).
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Great book. Greater author I'd do anything to meet. I want to post the entire Chapter 47: Kind Hearts and Crunchy Granola, but will let you discover it yourself. Here's a bit: the group, in their journey, comes across a settlement of aging hippies at a riverbank. The hippies notice the children are hungry and offer food, "I bet you kiddies would like some breakfast. Help us carry the baskets of fish and we'll lay some nutrition on you." I can not wait to say "lay some nutrition on you". It may
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Daniel Manus Pinkwater is an author of mostly children's books and is an occasional commentator on National Public Radio. He attended Bard College. Well-known books include Lizard Music, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, Fat Men from Space, Borgel, and the picture book The Big Orange Splot. Pinkwater has also illustrated many of his books in the past, although for more recent works that
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