I listened to this on accident mostly, trying to find something to occupy myself in the middle of a migraine, but ooo boy is this story good. I think I prefer having listened to it, actually, than I would have reading the book--the performer (Bronson Pinchot) did an incredible job with all of the voices of the characters and the accents. That being said, I will probably have to look at this in physical book form to see the art, which I'm sure is beautiful.

The story gripped me pretty immediately, and the tone of the reading did that kind of interact-y way that MG books sometimes do without coming across as particularly patronizing or even annoying to my adult ears. Charlie was a pretty interesting main character and I can see kids really being drawn to him, and the world is just delightful. The class politics are a little all over the place (the Whiz Mob paint themselves initially as folks pursuing a kind of redistribution of wealth but that all rapidly falls apart) but it's not like I can super demand certain kinds of class politics from an MG book. The ending was a little difficult to listen to because it was so intense and while I had parts of it figured out, I felt like I had to sit through material I would have otherwise kind of skimmed past. But clearly I enjoyed this book, and I blew through it in a pretty fast time!