Wally and Cheyenne Schluffmuffin, ten-year-old twins, become orphans under the most absurd circumstances. First, their incredibly skinny father falls into a Porta Potti and drowns. Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, their mother is "smothered by a gang of angry bunnies" the next day. The Schluffmuffin twins are taken in by their tiny grandmother who happens to weigh only forty-nine pounds. Sadly enough, Grandma Schluffmuffin gets "carried off by a nearsighted eagle that mistook her for a raccoon." With no other relative to care for them, the twins are sent off to the Jolly Days Orphanage.
Life doesn't get any better for the twins at the Jolly Days Orphanage. Hortense Jolly, owner of the Jolly Days Orphanage, makes all thirty-eight orphans wake up every morning at 5 a.m. After waking, the orphans have exactly six minutes to dress, comb their hair, brush their teeth, and run to the breakfast table. If any orphan is a second late (Hortense Jolly stands at the table with a stopwatch) that child has to do extra chores. Each orphan also has a full 6 hours of chores to perform each day. As luck would have it, Wally is precisely seven seconds late for breakfast on the morning that this story begins, and he is stuck cleaning the toilets.
When things couldn't possibly get any worse, the Mandible sisters come to the orphanage. They want to adopt two children, and the Schluffmuffin twins are just what they are looking for.
You may think that two orphans would be excited to finally leave the Jolly Days Orphanage. However, as Wally and Cheyenne sit in the homeward bound car with the Mandible sisters, the Onts, things begin to get a little weird.
The Onts, the first book in the Secrets of Dripping Fang series by Dan Greenburg, is an odd tale that tickles the giggle-bone in every child. Both of my children and myself each took turns reading a chapter before bedtime and found we just could not stop reading the book after a mere three chapters. We're anxious to begin book two in the series, Treachery and Betrayal at Jolly Days.
