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Kate McKinnon's new middle-grade mystery is for all her fellow misfits
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Emmy Award-winning SNL star and Weird Barbie Kate McKinnon can now add novelist to her resume.
Her first book, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette For Young Ladies of Mad Science, is a middle-grade mystery full of oddball characters, creatures and contraptions.
The novel, which hit shelves Tuesday, is part of what she calls her “private mission to give a wink and a nod” to young people who might feel “different,” like she did, growing up.
McKinnon, whose characters and impressions on SNL are legendary, fully admits she was a “weird” kid. She wore a Peter Pan costume to school every day for a year. Later, she dressed like Pippi Longstocking. “I would go to school in these outfits because I felt more confident … and somehow more myself. Go figure,” she told NPR.
As a kid, McKinnon shared her room with an array of pets including Madagascar hissing cockroaches and an iguana named Willy. “It's not something I would do again. And I don't recommend it for anyone,” advised McKinnon. “That said, oh my gosh, we had fun me and that iguana. And by ‘fun’ I mean we had a contentious relationship that felt like a bad marriage that we'd entered into because one of us was pregnant.” McKinnon says eventually her mom, a social worker, sent the iguana to a reptile rescue organization in Boca.
Even though her parents fully supported her eccentricities, McKinnon said she often felt like an outcast among her peers: “I just felt very wrong. Like, I was not good enough and was wrong.”
Then she found her people. “In fourth grade we started a Honeysuckle Eaters Club on the playground. So we would go into a corner while all the cool girls were watching the guys play basketball. We would go and eat honeysuckle and try to understand the correlation between flower color and sweetness of nectar. And we made notes,” McKinnon laughed. “So that's what I had cookin,’ and luckily, I was not alone.”
Small wonder one of her favorite authors was Roald Dahl; she especially liked his book The Witches, in which the title characters turn children into mice.
“I love a delicious villain. And who's more delicious than the Grand High Witch,” McKinnon declared. “But I loved also that it started with a set of instructions about how to identify real witches. And I was so taken by that because I thought, ‘I know it's fantasy, but like, he's talking to me.’”
In similar fashion, McKinnon breaks the fourth wall throughout Millicent Quibb, telling readers they can "take a short break" and that she's going to hand the story "over to the illustrator... and go watch TV." She's referring to Alfredo Cáceres.
The novel, the first in a series, begins with a warning:
"The situations contained in these books could cause:
Instant death
Extremely instant death (bad)
Semi-instant death (worse)
Burning in the upper extremities
Burning in the lower extremities
Permanent intestinal parasites"
And so on.
McKinnon narrates the audiobook with help from her sister, comedian Emily Lynne.
Set in 1911 in the fictional town of Antiquarium, tween sisters Gertrude, Eugenia and Dee-Dee Porch have passions that include slugs, bats, rocks, explosions and building machines. Suffice it to say they do not belong in snooty Antiquarium where girls attend etiquette school and the official dog is the bichon frisé. They’re teased by classmates and shamed by their teacher.
Enter Millicent Quibb, the ostracized, disorganized, well-meaning mad scientist who trains the Porch sisters to help her save the town from the dangers lurking underground.
Quibb’s hair is described as “a chaotic nest of salty, windswept fibers that were thick as sea rope.” She wears a lab coat “splattered with stains of all colors and textures-a neon green smear, a dribble of oatmeal, a matrix of dried intestines.”
Despite rewriting the first chapter "like 500 times,” McKinnon said she loved “writing about these three little weirdos and their Willy Wonka-esque mentor in this stuffy turn of the century town.”
It took her more than 10 years to write Millicent Quibb. She got the idea before joining SNL in 2012. At the time she was doing sketch comedy for free in the basement of a New York supermarket with the Upright Citizens Brigade.
“Sketch comedy and middle grade literature have a lot in common, namely funny names and big hair,” McKinnon said, “And so it just felt for me like a way to perform when I didn't have to be at a show at the basement that night.”
McKinnon said she hopes her oddball heroes make her fellow misfits feel less alone. She’s a big believer that weirdness can be its own kind of superpower, “That thing that makes you weird. That's actually the thing that you can use to save the town, save the world, save yourselves. That's a message that I find true.”
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