Lemuel lives in the town of Hmm with his sister Shane, whose current ambition is to become Hmm’s next mayor at any cost. When their uncle dies in strange circumstances involving both “fire and explosion,” Shane inherits the uncle’s money and Lemuel receives a bizarre, Frankenstein’s monster–like creature. With “some pig right there, a dab of goat up around back…a little monkey perhaps…And possum in the middle,” the creature almost (but not quite) defies description, and Lemuel reflects that “simply standing there it disarranged your entire deductive facility.” Eventually, they christen the animal Yonder and involve him in a variety of hijinks, including Shane’s mayoral campaign and the confirmation of the uncle’s death. Yonder has a will of his own, however, and ropes his bewildered caretaker into many antics. Lemuel, while trying to figure out what Yonder’s nature is, investigates a menacing figure he dubs the “Strangitor” and stumbles upon romance with Mabel, a woman he meets up in the mountains. The world of the novel is eclectic, sometimes bordering on grotesque, and Lemuel’s musings, artfully littered with malapropisms (“I wished there was some way I could help if it wasn’t too strainuous and didn’t take too long”), are both entertaining and often surprisingly deep. The rollicking plot could be a bit more cohesive—while the ricocheting nature of the events fits with the mood of the narrative, this has the side effect of baking a disjointed quality into the chronology that can be confusing. Lemuel’s playfully adversarial relationship with his sister (and almost everyone else he meets) is entertaining, and his initial indifference and trepidation regarding Yonder growing into a profound love for the animal is as endearing as any dynamic found in a more traditional “man’s best friend” novel.