Weinersmith's Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home

Zach Weinersmith is great. I’ve read every new comic on SMBC for years, I support him on Patreon (extremely modestly), read his newsletter regularly, and taught my son Weinersmith’s book with Bryan Caplan, Open Borders, during the “Dad School” phase of the pandemic.

You know who else is great? Wodehouse.

So of course I had to read Weinersmith’s latest book, Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home, Weinersmith’s kid’s book tribute to Wodehouse. Officially, it’s for kids and officially I read it as “research” to see if any of the children in my life would enjoy it, but it entertained me throughout. It features a dippy young protagonist who is over-the-top unmotivated, an escalating mystery, and a twist ending.

A few years ago when my son was younger I read my share of Dog Man, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Both series made me laugh out loud along with my son. But I think Sawyer Lee had more laughs per page, and featured exactly the sort of inventive density of goodness that I was hoping for from Weinersmith. I have since passed the book on to a pair of neices. Within five minutes the younger (age 8) was reading a funny bit aloud to me from the book. Success.

If I have any reservation, it’s that the book is Wodehousian not just in spirit but in language. I love Britishisms from the British but from Americans it’s sort of cheating, and I would have loved to see some of the humour here translated more closely into the American contemporary vernacular. But that’s a very mild reservation, and I heartily recommend the book for all the children in your life, after you’ve stealth-read it yourself.