Day 86: The Hoboken Chicken Emergency

When he was in second grade, my son needed to pick a novel for a classroom project and I suggested Daniel Pinkwater’s The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. He later said, “Daniel Pinkwater’s books are hilarious.”

The plot goes something like this:

One day, Arthur Bobowicz is sent to the store to buy a thanksgiving turkey and ends up buying Henrietta, a 266 pound bird from a mad scientist named Professor Mazzocchi. Arthur convinces his parents to let him keep Henrietta as a pet. The rest of the plot is just as ridiculous. 

The story is filled with plenty of zaniness, like this bit of dialogue between Arthur and the professor:

"But how do you get squared off goldfish?" he asked.

"Of course! My secret! I do this: I put the little baby goldfish in a medium sized tank. All around the tank I put beautiful oil paintings of the bottom of a lake. The little baby goldfish is very stupid. He doesn't know they are only photographs. Also, when he bumps into the glass walls of his tank, he can't understand that it is glass -- so he forgets about it. Fish do not like to think about things they can't understand. So! Thinking the tank is as big as a lake, the goldfish begins to grow. He gets so big that his sides are touching the walls of the tank. Soon he grows to fill the corners. To make the top of the fish flat, I turn him over every so often. Presto! A square fish. The only thing I have to watch out for, is that the fish will displace all the water in his tank and suffocate. When the fish is nice and square, I put him in a nice big tank, with other nice fishes, and he is very happy."

"But why do you want them to be square?" Arthur asked.

"Why? Why? Because they are easy to stack when they are that shape, you silly boy!" Professor Mazzochi shouted.

Pinkwater’s book was originally published in 1977, but, at least in my opinion, it pairs well with the other children’s book I wrote about recently, Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer, published in 2015.