Weirded Out: Review The Extremely Weird Thing That Happened in Huggabie Falls by Adam Cece and Andrew Weldon

Huggabie Falls is the weirdest town on earth, a place that is filled with extremely weird people who fill their days doing extremely weird things.

It’s a place where factories exist in another dimension, there’s a bottomless river, a topless hill and a train tunnel to nowhere. The people who live there are equally unusual – witches, pirates, talking rats, invisible families and that’s just the beginning.

The story opens with friends Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany at school on a day like any other; not what you would call a ‘normal’ day but they don’t do ‘normal’ in Huggabie Falls – or do they?

When Mrs Turgan asks her class if anyone knows about the extremely weird thing that happened at Huggabie Falls, she piques the curiosity of the three friends and they set out to get to the bottom of what could possibly be so weird in the weirdest place on Earth.

On returning home, they are faced with the shocking fact that things are starting to become ‘normal.’ If Kipp, Tobias and Cymphony are going to save the world as they know it, they’ll have to take drastic action.

A suspicious business card found in Kipp’s letter box leads them to the evil Felonious Dark of Dark’s Weirdness Investigation Agency.

Felonious views weirdness as something distasteful that should be eradicated and at first, Kipp, Tobias and Cymphony are won over by his arguments in defence of the ‘normal’, but when they start to realise that it’s their differences that bring them together they pull out all the stops to bring an end to his evil campaign.

They have to be ready to take on bats, piranhas and worst of all, the normal and rational…

Adam Cece, winner of the 2017 Text Prize, creates a highly energised and vibrant world of unexpected characters and events at every turn. As an active narrator, he comically interrupts and often steers the story off track only to reprimand himself for losing the plot.

The Extremely Weird Thing that Happened in Huggabie Falls is inventive, original and will engage even the most resistant middle-grade readers with its fast pace and hilariously ‘weird’ characters. This is the first in a planned trilogy, so expect a lot more weirdness to come.

Excellent, we can’t wait.

Purchase a copy of The Extremely Weird Thing That Happened in Huggabie Falls

Adam Cece lives in Adelaide. His first book, Wesley Booth Super Sleuth, was published in 2015. In 2017, Adam won the Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing for The Extremely Weird Thing that Happened in Huggabie Falls.

Andrew Weldon is a cartoonist whose work has appeared in the AGE, the BIG ISSUE, the AUSTRALIAN and the NEW YORKER. He has written and illustrated several children’s books including the Don’t Look Now series with Paul Jennings. Andrew lives in Melbourne.