by Nelson
Reader Beware; You’re in for a Scare!
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
With Goosebumps, “bad” is a very subjective word. One reader’s bad is another reader’s favorite wormy adventure. I can’t tell you that The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena is bad. For all I know, you may enjoy books with plots that seem to be made up of two unfinished stories pieced together with R.L. Stine’s slimy duct tape of doom. Love it or hate it, one thing is absolutely certain: The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena is asinine.
Jordan Blake and his younger sister Nicole live in super-hot, super-humid, super-miserable Pasadena and spend their summer days dreaming about snow and how awesome it is. Instead of the tried and true “one sibling loves scaring the other” formula, the Blake kids’ deal is that the younger Nicole is real smart and in the same class as her older brother because she got a to skip a grade. She takes every opportunity to throw her near limitless knowledge in Jordan’s face, and he doesn’t like that one bit. The siblings are friends with a girl named Lauren, and all three of them get bullied by Kyle and Kara – local twins who specialize in friendly neighborhood beatings and unwanted bicycle modifications. Weirdly enough, the twins love teasing them over their hatred of the heat. Their trigger seems to be low morale on the block.
A summer of no fun in the sun gets shaken up when Mr. Blake, a nature photographer, scores a “take a picture of the abominable snowman all the locals keep seeing” gig in Alaska and decides to take the kids with him. It seems weird that you’d want to bring your kids on a literal monster hunt, but Mr. Blake doesn’t believe the snowman exists, and he’s trying to score “cool parent” points since he and the former Mrs. Blake are recently divorced. Look at Stine tackling those relevant and sensitive childhood issues. In this story, being the cool dad means taking your kids to Alaska for a ten-mile trek through the snow to stay in an abandoned, remote cabin to look for a mythical beast believed to be responsible for a series of local disappearances.
The Blakes employ the services of a grouchy guide named Arthur – who promptly abandons them at the cabin and steals their sled when Mr. Blake isn’t looking. The kids catch him in the act and get lost trying to chase him down, but that’s okay because they wind up discovering the big, hairy Abominable Snowman of Alaska in a block of ice. The beast breaks out and tries to carry the kids off, but they manage to escape thanks to an assist from the only sled dog Arthur didn’t steal. They get back to the cabin and lead their dad to the Alaskan yeti – who is, once again, frozen in a block of ice.
Mr. Blake decides that the best thing to do is load the frozen snowman in a big airtight trunk and haul him to Pasadena. He radios for a helicopter that promptly shows up and takes everyone home. Why didn’t they just use a copter to get to the cabin in the first place? Because Mr. Blake didn’t want to miss the opportunity to take pictures, silly. At this point, the story is past the halfway point, and we’re only now going from Abominable Snowman of Alaska to Abominable Snowman of Pasadena. Back home, Lauren comes over, and Jordan decides to show off some snowballs that he stashed in snowman’s trunk only to discover that they’re magic snowballs when they cover the backyard in a thick layer of snow and turn his poor sister into a big frozen statue. He and Lauren decide that releasing the frozen snowman is the best thing to do. The big guy emerges from the ice and thaws out Nicole with a big ole hug before he rolls around in the backyard and absorbs all the snow. Then he realizes that he’s in California instead of Alaska and angrily runs off. The kids decide to bury the rest of the magic snowballs because they’ve had enough cold weather to last a lifetime, and the book ends with the bullying twins digging them up – oblivious to their terrible, magical powers.
I can’t say that I didn’t crack a few smiles reading it, but it sure seems like Stine had a half finished story about magical snow in Pasadena that he stuck to a mostly finished story about an Abominable Alaskan Snowman. Why were the snowballs magical and what happens to the misplaced snowman? Nobody. Knows.
I turned to Lauren. “It’s working!” I cried happily. “He’s defrosting her!”
A trembling smile crossed Lauren’s worried face.
A few seconds later, the snowman let Nicole go. The ice and snow had all melted and disappeared. The snowman gave a satisfied grunt and stepped back.
Doubtfire 