Sasquatch and the Muckleshoot

Adam Gidwitz and Joseph Bruchac's Sasquatch and the Muckleshoot is a fast, funny adventure for 8 year olds about two children who go looking for Bigfoot.

What happens

Uchenna Devereaux is sitting in a classroom where a boy called Jimmy has learned to fart the tune of Happy Birthday and Miss Vole is asking whether anybody has heard of the West Coast. Uchenna is bored enough to consider putting a pencil through her own ear.

Then she notices her best friend Elliot isn't there.

Elliot is hiding behind a cafeteria door, hoping for one boring day. No mythical creatures. No evil billionaires. No plane crashes. Please, not him.

Him is Professor Fauna, who teaches social studies, runs the Unicorn Rescue Society from a room under the school, and kicks the classroom door open hard enough to knock three pictures off the wall.

Bigfoot, he announces, loudly, to a room he was trying to whisper in. Then, when everyone stares, he improvises an explanation involving a wart on his own big foot that is worth the price of admission by itself.

This one sits somewhere in the middle of a series, and your reader will follow it perfectly well, but they'll get more out of it having read one of the earlier ones first. Elliot and Uchenna already have Jersey, a small blue creature with the head of a tiny deer and bright red wings, who travels in a backpack with holes poked in it. They've already survived one crash in the professor's plane. The plane crashes on every flight, which Elliot brings up more than once.

What's different about this one is where they go. Mack is a member of the Muckleshoot Indian Nation in Washington, and the book takes proper time over that. His name in Muckleshoot means bright minded. His daughter Raven argues with him about the tribal council's logging deal with the Schmoke company, and she knows exactly which relative might be the leak inside it. It's written as a real place with real disagreements going on in it, not as scenery.

The two children are what make it work. Elliot is frightened of everything and has read a great deal about all of it. Uchenna makes up songs about whatever is in front of her, and they are gloriously bad. Neither of them is the sensible one.

There's some peril, mainly logging machinery and chainsaws, and the professor's driving is genuinely alarming. Nothing worse than that in the opening chapters.

What to read next

If your reader wants to know how Elliot got quite so nervous, there's an earlier trip in the library. It's called The Basque Dragon, and it starts with a package that has no stamps on it and ends up across an ocean, in the mountains, looking for something that has gone missing.