Kate Klise.  Trial by Journal.  Illustrated by M. Sarah Klise.  HarperTrophy, 2001.  238 pages.  Age 9 to 12.

Let’s start by saying that this book is entirely implausible.  But!  Lily Watson has been drafted to be the first juvenile juror, thanks to a controversial new state law regarding crimes committed against minors.  At first it seems like an open and shut case, as the prime suspect signed a confession for the murder of 11-year-old Perry Keet.  Never mind the fact that no body has been recovered; he’s weird and a little creepy, so he must be the culprit.  Yeah, not quite.

This is an animal-themed story.  It centers around a zoo and the Menagerie Hotel, where all the rooms are decorated based on a different animal.  (Lily’s room, for example, has zebra print from wall to wall, and then some.)  It’s almost forgivable, then, that the characters’ names are animal puns.  Wrack your brain to figure these out:  Ken Guru, E. Gall, L. E. Font, Kim Illion, and you’re already acquainted with Perry Keet.  Wait, it gets better.  Sometimes the names based on a person’s profession, like Art X. Spurt, professor of art history, and Dick Shunary, professor of linguistics.  Ha ha!  Though this probably would have bothered me less as a kid…and I can’t really talk because it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out “Rhett Tyle.”  Get it?!?!  And don’t think I’m spoiling them for you, because there are plenty more.

To its credit, the book is ungenreable.  Rather than a cohesive narrative, it’s a collection of correspondence, news articles, radio transcripts, court documents, and journal entries.  And it’s heavily illustrated, so I figured it would be well-received by my short attention span.  I found myself skipping ahead a lot.  Maybe the print was too small, or maybe I fell into my habit of reading the first two paragraphs of an article, then skipping the rest.  That’s my shortcoming, though.  It’s no reflection on the book, which, despite my griping, was entertaining.  And I think it resolves its message about what an assumption can do to “u” and “me.”

Quotable:

The horror of the truth…and of the lunchroom!

“The fact is, we’re NOT safe.  Nobody is.  That’s the whole point.  There’s no such thing as being safe—here or anywhere.  People get hurt every day.  Some people get killed by weirdos like Bob White and some people just get teased to death at the lunch table for drinking orange soda or eating a tuna fish sandwich.”  (p. 61)

I was annoyed with one character, until he reminded me of someone…

“So it goes.  And like I always say, I’ve got the perfect face for birdcage liner.”  (p. 148)