One cannot generally count on Pinkwater to follow literary rules. His books may have convoluted plots that go nowhere, or different narrative voices that interrupt each other and ramble on about this or that, as in Slaves of Spiegel (1982; see separate entry, Vol 9), in which the third-person omniscient narrator, a staple of myth-making and story-telling for thousands of years, has to introduce itself in order to be distinguishable from the other voices. In The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, there is a recognizable plot which, though it has twists and turns that would tie a snake into knots, actually goes towards and achieves a resolution. Pinkwater likes to have his protagonists tell their own stories, and in this book the narration is fully coherent as Walter provides an especially effective narrative voice; courageous, willing to take a chance, insecure yet loyal, he is very...