The Snarkout Boys and the Avocadoof Death could be mistaken for a book that only dramatizes social and personal issues in the emotionally charged contexts of teenagers in high school, but it is better seen as a wildly imaginative, fresh look at life's endless variety and possibilities. The unfettered imagination that is so prominent a feature of the novel does not hide the fact that the story confronts issues dealt with in other Pinkwater books. A fine example of this is the wretched school which appears in different forms in most of Pinkwater's novels: sometimes it is a junior high school, more often a high school; sometimes it is in a suburb, other times in a city; sometimes the majority of students are very clean-cut, other times they are antisocial; sometimes the majority of students constitute a not inconsiderable part of the problems with the school...