I haven’t read many books by Kate DiCamillo until recently. DiCamillo fans will have their favorite, from “Because of Winn-Dixie” or “The Tale of Despereaux,” to the Mercy Watson books. 

 “Flora & Ulysses, the Illuminated Adventures,” illustrated by K.G. Campbell, won the Newbery in 2014 (DiCamillo’s second Newbery!) and falls somewhere in between the melancholy (“Winn-Dixie” or “Despereaux”) and the sweetly hilarious (Mercy Watson).

Flora is a young girl whose parents have divorced. She lives with her mother who writes romance books (a genre Flora abhors), loves a lamp in the shape of a shepherdess more than her daughter, and thinks Flora should be reading “true literature,” not “the idiotic high jinks of comics.”

But Flora loves reading the comics, especially the “Illuminated Adventures of the Great Incandesto!,” which is about a janitor named Alfred T. Slipper, who falls into a vat of Incandesto-brand cleaning fluid and becomes a superhero. Flora is a self-proclaimed cynic; someone who doesn’t get their hopes up, who doesn’t believe in love and who shouldn’t love the way good wins out over evil in every issue of the Great Incandesto. 

One of many fun things in this story are the expressions Flora uses from the Incandesto comics. Her favorite is “Holy Bagumba,” but there is also “Holy unanticipated occurrences,” and “This malfeasance must be stopped.”

The story begins when Flora sees a squirrel being sucked into her neighbor’s new vacuum cleaner … in the backyard. 

“Who vacuums their yard?” wonders Flora, as she rushes to rescue the squirrel. 

Flora performs CPR on the squirrel, who revives and proceeds to pick up the enormous vacuum cleaner with one paw, based on Campbell’s wonderful illustrations. The perpetually hungry squirrel was only looking for crumbs, but Flora knows a superhero when she sees one. She names the squirrel Ulysses, after the vacuum cleaner. 

Ulysses is not only exceedingly strong, he understands humans, he writes poetry on Flora’s mom’s typewriter, and he can fly.

Like all DiCamillo stories, this one is full of unforgettable characters, from her neighbor Tootie Tickham and Tootie’s very odd great-nephew William Spiver, “I prefer to be called William Spiver. It distinguishes me from the multiplicity of Williams in the world,” to Dr. Meescham, Flora’s father’s neighbor. 

Dr. Meescham has a horsehair couch and refers often to her girlhood in Blundermeecen. Flora takes Ulysses to Dr. Meesham seeking medical advice after he hits his head on a door.

“Hmmm, yes. This could give a concussion [says Dr. Meesham]. When I was a girl in Blundermeecen, people were often getting concussions — gifts from the trolls, you understand.” 

And then a bit later she says, “Always, always one was knitting outfits for the little trolls.”

“What little trolls? Said Flora. “And where’s Blundermeecen?” 

“Never mind about the trolls for now. I meant only to say that life was very gloomy then, and one was always knitting.”

Meanwhile, Flora’s mother, another unforgettable character, takes an instant dislike to Ulysses and is determined to get rid of him, making her Flora’s archnemesis. But as much as Flora’s mom detests the squirrel, Flora’s dad, normally sad and withdrawn, comes alive upon meeting Ulysses and being part of his adventures.

All this is to say I hope young readers, and really, all readers, become Kate DiCamillo fans, if they are not already. With almost 40 books to her name and two more coming out next spring, you won’t run out of fun stories to read for quite a while!