It's Marvelous Middle Grade Monday with a review of Meems & Feefs: Ferrets from Planet Ferretonia! by Liza N. Cooper

Meems & Feefs:  Ferrets from Planet Ferretonia by Liza N. Cooper
Publisher:  Andrews Mc Meel Publishing
Format:  Paperback 
Number of pages: 192 pages
Published:   September 26th, 2023
Source:  Publisher 

Brothers Meems and Feefs live on Dook Dook Island in the Planet of Ferretonia.  Their little island is surrounded by water, and they've always been discouraged from venturing off the island.  But lately, Meems has been kind of bored with life on their small island.  He kind of feels like their mentors and the council have been hiding things from them.  What he'd really like to do is to go out and explore.  So, tech savvy Meems enlists the help of his fun-loving brother Feefs to build a travel opal to teleport off the island, using the ferret's ancient tech's.   

Their plan partially works, having teleported themselves to Earth, but there is one slight problem.  They're now stuck as their opal broke during the transport.  Hoping to find humans who might help, Meems and Feefs try to cross a busy road, and are picked up and brought to an animal shelter where they meet Liza.  To communicate with her, the brothers use a communication opal and Liza learns about their problems, she offers to help them to build a new travel device.  Can they find the materials they need, and will the brothers be able to teleport back to Planet Ferretonia?  Or will they be stuck on Earth for good?

Meems and Feefs are such adorable ferrets.  Polar opposites for sure.  Meems is heavy into building and technology.  He wears a tool belt and would be most happy fixing things.  He's also kind of the wild, ill tempered, judgmental and opinionated.  Now Feefs, he's a big softie, so sweet, fun loving, with a laisse 'faire attitude.  He's trusting, accepting and eager to learn about Earth.  The two together are quite cute, as they banter back and forth, well as siblings normally do.  Liza is also a very sweet, kind and sensitive girl.  She's experienced a lot of changes lately at home having lost a pet herself and some troubles academically.  Her older brother though is a huge support and tries to bring her out of her shell.  

This is a very cute and fun graphic novel.  I can certainly see this appealing to kids who like ferrets.   I just loved Meems and Feefs, they're just so adorable and really adventurous.  The illustrations are bright and colorful and really capture Meems and Feefs energy, it's a delightful book.   I also really enjoyed seeing the authors photographs at the back of the book of the real-life models (her own ferrets) as well as a few raw sketches of the two main characters.  And I don't know how I missed this, but the author, Liza even incorporated herself into the book.  How cool!  The ending leaves room for the story to go in many different directions which will be fun to explore once the next book is released.  As a side note, the author was an art director on the animated series, Simon's Cat. 

**A huge thank you to Andrews Mc Meel Publishing for the paperback in exchange for an honest review.**

     I hope you'll check out all the other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge's blog HERE