FLORA & ULYSSES: THE ILLUMINATED ADVENTURES

Listeners will need to hold on to their headphones as author DiCamillo and narrator Tara Sands treat them to a madcap adventure that bounces between quirky human characters and a squirrel with superhero dreams who also writes poetry. Ten-year-old Flora Belle Buckman witnesses said squirrel being disgorged from her neighbor Tootie Tickhams’s Ulysses Super-Suction Multi-Terrain 2000X vacuum cleaner. Sands’s narration is lively and fast paced. She takes on variety of personalities with gusto: among them, the determined Flora and her flappable mother, dramatic Tootie and her unexpected friend William Spiver, and the dreamy-voiced squirrel, Ulysses. Melodramatic music signals the story’s switch from the human world to the squirrel’s superhero fantasies. Relish the unexpected as Flora helps Ulysses blossom. A.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2013]