I'll probably take this off this blog and put it on struat.com sometime later

I read Daniel Pinkwater's newest book yesterday, The Artsy Smartsy Club. I give it a weary thumbs down, save a few pages toward the end, and a smattering of things here and there.

The problem is that Daniel Pinkwater is taking his position of "single-handedly educating two generations" (paraphrasing something found probably somewhere on the web, I don't know where) a bit... too... much.

I look toward the reviews posted at Amazon, and notice this disagreeable sentence:

Pinkwater has a message to deliver here on the joys of both making and appreciating art, but his conglomeration of eccentric characters and goofy plot twists keep the story from becoming overly didactic.

No they don't.

Okay. That being said... I could try to imagine myself as the "Age 8 to 12" group the book was meant for -- unaware of what happened to Van Gogh's ear or except in an intuitive sense the definition of "didactic", and... I think it would still leave me... cold.

Go ahead and read it... it's redeemable on various levels, and it'd be a quick read. But don't buy it. Buy this one instead.