The Racc Pack by Stephanie Cooke, Art by Whitney Gardner. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2024. 9781665914932. 184pp.
I’ve been a fan of Gardner’s work since reading her YA vampire graphic novel, Fake Blood. And I had just heard 99% Invisible’s Raccoon Resistance episode, about Toronto’s attempts to make its trash cans raccoon-proof. Both these facts plus the book’s tag-line — “live fast, eat trash” — pretty much guaranteed that I was going to pick it up.
Raccoons Dusty (the brains) and ReRe (the muscle), plus their possum friend Scraps (the gadget guy), do their best work at night, going through people’s trash. But when the mayor of Toronto invests in raccoon-proof garbage cans…well, it’s not much of a challenge. When they find a market that’s throwing out so much “ugly” food they decide to try to push the place’s bin to their house, but the whole plan gets them into more trouble than ever. Luckily, a cat named JB comes to the rescue. She seems to want to help them come up with a plan to steal the dumpster, too. But it’s unclear what she’s going to get out of that.
There’s a madcap sense of humor running through this dumpster-diving story, and Gardner’s illustrations really add to the heist as “Mission Impawssible” gets underway.
A sequel to this book was just in January.
