James Kennedy’s onstage at the Hideout, wearing a pink jumpsuit and a feather-collared, transparent lab coat. His shock of blond hair flops around as he bounces up and down, playing bass in the “glam-psychedelic-new wave” band Brilliant Pebbles. The show is a release party, but not for a CD or a seven-inch: tonight the band is celebrating the publication of Kennedy’s debut novel, a young adult fantasy called The Order of Odd-Fish.
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The Order of Odd-Fish follows 13-year-old Jo Larouche and her adoptive aunt, Lily, from their “ruby palace” in the California desert to the tropical metropolis of Eldritch City, teeming with arcane festivals and foppish talking bugs. Going incognito to conceal a dark secret, Jo is initiated into the Odd-Fish, a lodge of knights who ride flying ostriches, and becomes Lily’s squire. Each knight specializes in a category of useless knowledge, such as unlikely instruments, unusual smells, or discredited metaphysics.
After college Kennedy volunteered as a science teacher at a junior high in Washington, D.C., living with an elderly nun and an Ethiopian refugee in a decrepit convent that inspired the Odd-Fish lodge. He spent a year in Tokyo as an English teacher and translator, lived in Chicago from 2000 to 2004, spent another two years in Japan’s ancient capital Nara (competing in the Naked Man Festival, which involves racing through the streets wearing nothing but a loincloth in the middle of winter), and then returned to Chicago in ’06.
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Thu 11/13, 8 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665. F
