My Curious Uncle Dudley Capa dura - 2004

The voice was coming from above. The floor above me.

"Help," it was repeating, very calmly — almost dignified. "I say, help . . ."

I peered out into the hall. "Uncle Dudley?" I called, hesitantly. Silence. Then again, faintly:

"Help . . . I say. Help . . ."

My heart began to beat fast. I went to the door to the third-floor stairs. I opened it. I heard the cries, more clearly.

"Uncle Dudley?" I called back. "Hello?"

Unsure, I started up. I¹d never heard an adult calling for help before! I waited breathless outside the guest-room door. I called again. The cries repeated. I knocked. With a hammering heart, I turned the handle. I peered inside.

The shock I got was so, well, shocking, I don¹t remember if I was too paralyzed to scream, like in your worst nightmares, and only gasped.

But I recall for sure my hair stood on end.

There in the dim room on the dim plaid blanket, where yesterday one lonesome tiny head had sat, now sat a second. Regular size. Not a head exactly — a pair of shoulders, from which stuck a neck and a goateed mouth and a nose and cheeks and an ear.

And nothing else.

"Ah, Duncan, is that you? How nice of you to come," said Uncle Dudley's partial head. "Don't be alarmed. Well, I mean, don't be unnecessarily alarmed. You aren't,
are you?"

"Wh-wh-wh — " I replied.

"Just ran into a bit of complication, you see," the mouth went on. "Hoping you might lend a hand."

And it grinned, pleasantly.

MY CURIOUS UNCLE DUDLEY by Barry Yourgrau. Copyright (c) 2004 by Barry Yourgau. Published by Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.

"This is my kind of book! Yourgrau and Auth are a perfect pairing. I am plenty jealous." — Daniel Pinkwater — Daniel Pinkwater

Barry Yourgrau's adult works include HAUNTED TRAVELLER, WEARING DAD'S HEAD, and A MAN JUMPS OUT OF AN AIRPLANE. A performer too, he has appeared on MTV and NPR. Of MY CURIOUS UNCLE DUDLEY, his first book for young readers, he says, "I've always been influenced by children's books -- so I decided to write one myself. I remembered the exotic visits, when I was young, by my uncles from far away. And my own visits, as an uncle myself, to my nephew and niece. So I'm part Dudley, you see, and part Duncan."
Tony Auth's irreverent, incisive, and delightful Pulitzer Prize-winning
political cartoons have appeared in the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER and other newspapers around the world since 1971. When he first read Barry Yourgrau's MY CURIOUS UNCLE DUDLEY, he jumped at the chance to illustrate it. "The eccentricity of Uncle Dudley, the cast of wacky characters, and the humane irreverence of the story really attracted me," he says. "I love all the magical mistakes and mess-ups, especially Barry's tender, amused look at the tolerance of children for the grownups in their world."