Waiting for the Voo

Welp! It seems the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Time to call the plumber. But can the mysterious and downright quirky Cardamon Webb save our existence with a toilet plunger and a user manual? Two hapless, young, everyday heroes, an awkward thirteen-year-old named Wilkin Delgado and a feisty fourteen-year-old named Alice Jane Zelinski have their doubts. Yet with their once-familiar world now becoming lost, it is up to them to find inner direction amid a chaotic and dying world.  But, wait! What should be a united mission in world salvation is complicated by the likes of Philbus Trot. This scoundrel has a history of self-serving destruction, but when he happens onto the likes of Wilkin and Alice Jane—he may have met his match.

Author Dean Ammerman offers up a delightful blend of adventure, courage, friendship and humor.  His voice is especially appealing to the young adult audience. Despite the signs of impending disaster, kids are still kids and the way Ammerman allows the characters to interpret their rather grim circumstances is cleverly authentic.

Alice Jane: Let me tell you, the Gutrog had amazing superhuman strength. I’d never in my life faced anything like it before, and I’ve arm-wrestled gorillas, thrown a sumo wrestler twenty feet, bench pressed 403 pounds and opened a Diet Coke with my eyelids.

Ammerman’s literary strategy is one that proves successful both in this plot and in life; if you teach a child the lessons of life and arm them with the tools necessary to succeed, a child can lead.

While the plot, itself, seems simplistic (yet so fun to read) the message is one of substance.  Success isn’t found in relying on other people or organizations or even governments to make decisions for you. That’s wasting time waiting for the Voo. Stay away from the Voo. The Voo will weigh you down and destroy you. Instead, success is achieved in developing one’s own strengths, recognizing the strengths and knowledge in others, determining whom to trust, educating oneself on the good things, identifying the solutions to a problem, then – go.  Take the lead, and make the world better than the way you found it.

Buried beneath the outlandish circumstances of world annihilation is a lesson in empowerment.

~ IndieReader.