Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

Flora Belle Buckman is a self described cynic who reads comic books instead of novels and keeps a running list of hard truths she has picked up from them, and her parents' divorce has left her mostly alone in a house across the street from a neighbor whose new vacuum cleaner, in the book's opening pages, sucks up a squirrel. Flora rescues the squirrel and names him Ulysses, and the vacuum accident has left him with genuine superpowers, incredible strength, flight, and the ability to type, which he first demonstrates by pecking out fragments of poetry on Flora's mother's typewriter rather than anything a normal squirrel would do. Flora's romance novelist mother, horrified by an animal loose in her house, orders Ulysses killed, and Flora spends the rest of the book trying to protect him, recruiting an odd, earnest cast that includes a temporarily blinded boy named William Spiver, while Ulysses himself keeps composing verse about love that neither he nor Flora quite knows how to hear yet. The crisis peaks when Flora's mother, cornered and furious, takes Ulysses away meaning to be rid of him for good, and it is one of his poems, once it is finally read, that breaks through Flora's practiced cynicism and her mother's anger at once, letting mother and daughter see each other honestly for maybe the first time in the book.

DiCamillo and illustrator K. G. Campbell split the storytelling between straightforward prose chapters and full comic book panels drawn as Ulysses's own adventures, so the book physically looks like two kinds of story interleaved. It reads fast and funny, aimed squarely at readers who like their sentiment cut with absurdity, a squirrel superhero who writes poetry being exactly the kind of joke the book is in on rather than playing straight.