Accompanied by quirky line drawings by Spanish illustrator Erica
Salcedo, this is a gently humorous and remarkably informative
nature-adventure story about an unlikely pointy-nosed hero with big
dreams and an even bigger heart.
After he nearly drowns in a parking-lot puddle, Dinnn Needles is fearful
of many things, including flying. When his four hundred siblings swarm
off without him, he finds time to dream --about family stories, a lost
brother, adventure in The Wild and, above all, how to be cool.
At school in an abandoned air-conditioner, Dinnn learns about the deadly
Pondhawk dragonfly and other dangers that lie beyond his home under a
drive-in theater screen. But Dinnn never really takes to city life.
Lonely and left out, he is filled with an unexplained longing. He sips
spilled cola from abandoned pop cans, but it is not as tasty as flower
nectar. He tries to make friends with the local street mosquitoes, but
that just lands him in a sewer filled with spiders and water snakes. He
hears about the red mini-van that brought his parents together and
wonders about his extended family in the country. He even finds a great
black jacket in a roadside ditch, but it doesn't make him cool.
And then one day, as fate would have it, the red mini-van reappears,
giving Dinnn a chance to visit to his relatives in The Wild, where new
perils await an inexperienced city mosquito -- being struck by a
raindrop, zapped by a porch light or snapped up by a hungry fish at
dusk. But in the end Dinnn discovers that being cool is a matter of what
you do, especially for one's friends and family, including two new
brothers.
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language
Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.3
Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or
feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of
events
