My Best Friend is Extinct

Henry is the new kid in town, a town he is prepared to love because it is in the mountains and it has SNOW!, lots of snow which makes it a big change from Victoria where he used to live. Unfortunately snow, while great to dig in (Henry loves digging), is also great for snowballs, and Henry is all too frequently the snowballs’ target, particularly in the school yard, forbidden though they are. However, snow is also great for building snow forts, and two rival gangs develop, the Weasels and the Packrats, each determined that, when the war comes between them, its fort will be the strongest with the best tunnels and the best escape routes and the best supply of snowball ammunition.

Henry is one of the Packrats, tolerated because he has a great advantage: he owns his own shovel! Everyone else has to share the meager supply of school shovels (and the big kids hog them), but Henry’s shovel telescopes into his back pack and is always with him. Henry gets put to digging tunnels, but a couple of the Weasels realize where he is working, and, just as his tunnel breaks though into an even bigger tunnel, they jump on the snow over the spot where he is. He’s buried alive, but not before he thinks he has seen a white Something with big blue eyes in the space in front of him! Several hours, a hospital visit, and a concussion later, Henry is back home, wondering about this Thing that he has seen and determined to investigate in spite of strict instructions to stay quiet in a darkened room for days and days.

When finally Henry escapes to go out digging again, he does indeed find a creature which, with the help of the school librarian, is identified as a short-faced bear cub that has been injured by – wait for it – a very scary saber-toothed tiger. The only problem is that both creatures have been extinct for 10,000 years!

The plot gets rather convoluted at this point, but, in the end, instead of fighting each other, the Packrats and the Weasels unite against these saber-toothed "fangers" to protect the "yarpies", i.e., Henry's pal Yarp (Henry’s name for the bear cub) and his pack. The same collapse-the-tunnel scheme that the Weasels had used on Henry is employed to trap and bury the fangers, letting the yarpies escape to a more secret valley where they can continue their peaceful not-extinct existence. And Henry, while losing his "best friend" Yarp, gains a whole lot of grade four friends and acceptance in his new school.

My Best Friend is Extinct is a story of a slightly unusual, slightly "weird" kid (I don't think I am imagining the ADHD tendency), with a mother with an unusual job for a woman (driving a snowplow), trying to fit into a new situation, and since most of us are a bit weird in some way or other, the book will resonate with practically everyone. But it is also an exciting story. We care about Yarp and the rest of the yarpies, and we laugh with the kids who are making their mothers so happy by bringing home empty lunch boxes day after day because the yarpies will eat anything, even brown bananas and celery sticks! And we empathize with Henry who first tries to fit in, with a bit of lying and cheating, until he realizes that telling the truth is less likely to lead him into major difficulties. I do wonder at the ease with which Henry manages to communicate with Yarp who seems to understand English right from the first encounter. Henry isn't the only weird thing about the story, but it all works, and not just the young readers will enjoy it. I was riveted, frankly, and I think they will be, too.

The illustrations are black-and-white, full of action and with lots of determined round-eyed kids who nevertheless have a slightly oriental look to them, unless I am being overly influenced by the illustrator's name which is Li. Frankly, I loved the illustrations. The pictures also are nicely placed to break up the text and make understanding what is going on easier for the reader who may be tackling a proper novel for the first time.

It's hard to write a truly exciting and entertaining novel for younger readers, and Barrett has succeeded brilliantly. Kids will love My Best Friend is Extinct, and adults will too. Henry's mother is perhaps beyond-belief tolerant of his disappearing for a day, the supervising teachers quite remarkably blind to the preparations for war going on under their noses, and, as I mentioned, the yarpies all seem able to understand not only language but also cooperation and the necessity of leaving the neighbourhood of the schoolyard in spite of its apparently endless supply of lunch-box goodies. However, we can accept all of these in the cause of a good story with a happy ending.