Title: Otto P. Nudd
Author: Emily Butler
Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers
Genre: Middle Grade Novel
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 240
Binding: Hardcover
(Reviewed by Michael Austin)
In an era where we have been blessed with any number of entirely adequate books squirrel battle tactics and corvid revenge plots, Emily Butler’s Otto P. Nudd stands out as the best of the lot. And of a lot of other lots too. For example, the revenge plot involves a Slinky, which you don’t see every day. And the gifted squirrel tactician is a single mother who works, quite literally, for peanuts. And in the process, Ms. Butler spikes the delightful animal fable with lessons about physics, mechanical engineering, the evolution of opposable thumbs, and, perhaps most importantly of all, friendship.
The eponymous corvid, Otto P. Nudd, is a raven with an attitude, to the extent that ravens have attitudes. He is a brilliant problem solver and erstwhile inventor who pairs with a human tinkerer to make things and get peanuts. Otto is the brainiest, peanut-havingest bird in the town, and he wants to make sure that everybody else knows it too. He lords it over the “lesser birds,” mistreats his corvid chums, and terrorizes any other animals who get too close to his humans or their food. And, as you might expect, nobody can stand him.
When an accident threatens the life of Otto’s favorite human, he has to marshall all of his friends to help. The problem, though, is that he doesn’t have any friends. Nobody likes him because he is such a schmuck. So what Otto really has to do is find a way to alter his personality (or, perhaps, his corvidnality) in under an hour, which is when the author peeks out from behind the fourth wall and delivers a tiny little lesson called “How to Make Amends and Influence People,” which is the whole of Chapter 19.
It is a good lesson and a good moral. But what makes Otto P. Nudd great is that, like most great children’s books, it is also an adult book (not THAT kind of adult book, so don’t even go there). Butler is an exceptional sentence-crafter. Her writing is poignant for children and hilarious for adults-both at the same time, without the poignancy and the hilarity ever getting in the way of one another. Like Jane Austen, she says serious things, but there is always a twinkle in her eye letting you know that she doesn’t quite take everything as seriously as her characters take everything—that she finds them funny even when they are supposed to be completely serious. I don’t know how she does it, but it is kind of amazing.
This is the sort of book that parents will want to read aloud to their children because they can experience a completely different book than the children do, and both of them can enjoy it together, but for different reasons. Or not, because sometimes a story about an arrogant raven is just a story about an arrogant raven, whether or not he keeps saying “nevermore,” which, if you turn to page 164, you will see that he does three times. Because of course he does. It is the kind of book where, if the raven failed to say “nevermore,” one would feel keenly the loss of a great opportunity.
And, at the end of Otto P. Nudd, I assure you, nobody feels anything other than the feeling of having read a really remarkable story.