Patrick Griffin's First Birthday on Ith

Gr 5–7—This second installment in the series finds Patrick covertly traveling through Ith—one of the series's titular three worlds—on griffinback alongside potential romantic interest Oma. Back on Earth, the jackalope BunBun and nine hyperintelligent numbats have a goal that's similar to Patrick's: to broadcast details of Rex Abraham's plot to take over Earth using a perfect cocktail of dogmatism and sophisticated technological devices. The novel alternates among the first-person points of view of members of Patrick's family, the Griffins' curmudgeonly neighbor Mr. Coffin, supervillain Rex Abraham, and more. The switching perspectives further the plot but do little for character development and make the plot hard to follow at times. The story begins with little explanation of what has already happened, and it ends in a cliff-hanger; this is not a book that works as a stand-alone. That said, Rust succeeds in injecting comedy and whimsy into what would otherwise be a generic upper elementary dystopian.