Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo 

Flora Belle Buckman loves comics, especially The Great Incandesto.  She lives with her divorced mother, a writer of terrible romance novels, and sees herself as a natural born cynic (and defier of contracts).  She looks out her window and sees a run-away giant vacuum cleaner chasing a squirrel.

Ulysses is a squirrel who survives being sucked up in a very powerful vacuum cleaner.  Only when he is dumped out of the bag, he has become a squirrel with super powers.  He can fly, he can understand what people are saying, he’s super strong and he writes poetry.  Poorly spelt poetry and mostly non-rhyming poetry, but poetry done on a typewriter, never the less.

No one wants to believe Flora that Ulysses has super powers, even when they watch him do things a squirrel normally cannot do.  A boy across the street, pretending to be blind is even skeptical.  But Flora’s father believes her.  So does his neighbor, a very old woman from ‘the old country’, wherever that is.  So then Flora and Ulysses set out to do super-hero things and get lost.

Get Real by Donald Westlake

John Dortmunder and his friends are hired, against their better judgement, to do a reality show about a gang of crooks who meet at their favorite bar in the back room.  Only they really want to rob the building where the filming is taking place in a mock-up of their favorite bar.  The real target is on the floor below the filming.  But it appears that it is used infrequently by visitors from out of the country.  When the gang breaks-in to find out where the real money is hidden, they discover that the real crooks are the people that own the company filming the show.  The gang doesn’t take all of the money, but the company isn’t going to go to the cops, because then they’d have to admit that they’re skimming the budgets of the shows they’re making and sending the money overseas.  All they can do is cancel the show.

 The Darwin Affair by Tim Mason

A library book club recommendation.  We have a police detective in London who has unwittingly been labeled as being the model for Dicken’s Inspector Bucket in his serial novel, Bleak House.  It’s made him popular with a lot of people, even the Queen.  He is given the responsibility to make sure she is safe on her way across London.  But a witless man waves a gun and screams anarchist slogans.  He gets away but is slain only a block from the scene.  A butcher’s apprentice sees a man fleeing the scene, but doesn’t think much about it.  The next day he is abducted.  The detective tracks people with no real success and is eventually let go for insubordination.  He accepts a job at a pub that is next to a funeral home.  One that is switching bodies from the coffins to sell as cadavers to the medical school across the way.  But then our detective recognizes one of the bodies.  And the race is on.  He is reassigned into the police and set to accompany the Queen and Prince Albert on their visit to Germany.  And the original assassin, along with his new ‘apprentice’, the butcher boy, follow to try to kill the Prince.

 The One and only Ivan by K.A. Applegate

Ivan is a gorilla who lives in a tourist trap mall off I95.  He has friends, Stella, an elephant, Bob a dog, and Julia, the janitor’s daughter, who brings him materials to do art.  Maurice, who owns the mall and the animals in it, raised Ivan after hunters killed his family.  But Stella is sick and Maurice doesn’t take care of her as he should.  A baby elephant, Ruby, captured as Ivan was, comes to the mall.  She’s scared.  Stella gives her some comfort and pointers, but Stella dies and just before she does, she asks Ivan to take care of the baby.  Ivan has to think for a long while, but he starts painting pieces of paper and makes enough to cover the billboard.  Julia talks her father into putting the pieces together on the billboard and suddenly the mall is the center of attraction again.  Maurice is happy at first to be making so much money.  But eventually the zoo learns of the animals and comes to inspect their cages.  In the end, Ivan and Ruby get to move to an open-air zoo.