Upon contacting the company that drives his books, Star Farm Productions (out of Chicago), say he is currently on Sabbatical in the Amazon with his type writer and a net (one of his many hobbies includes collecting rare bugs). Apparently, he’s been to both the North and South poles, and Poland. It is stated that he is an avid camper and fisherman who loves to travel.

The illustrator for the series is Rick Carton of Chicago, Illinois. The pen name is credited with nine books (with a tenth upcoming), published by both Tricycle Press, and more recently, Simon & Schuster. ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ĭharles Ogden is a pen name used by a collection of authors at Star Farm Productions for the Edgar & Ellen book series for children and young adults. ( July 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve it by removing promotional content and inappropriate external links, and by adding encyclopedic content written from a neutral point of view. (Sept.This article contains content that is written like an advertisement. First-time author Ogden's outlandish, hyperbolic humor recalls Lemony Snicket's tales of woe, yet this narrative's intermittent slapstick quality falls flat. The pace lags considerably as Edgar and Ellen try unsuccessfully to sell the ridiculous-looking creatures to the townsfolk before the neighborhood kids-red-eyed from crying over their missing pets-blow the whistle on the twins' nefarious doings. After purloining the neighbors' pets, the two use paint, glitter and Christmas decorations previously nabbed from other people's yards to transform the animals into 'rare beasts.' They then display the critters in a puppet theater that they've stolen from a kindergarten classroom and pull the menagerie through town on an old cart. In the absence of any parents, the siblings spend their days harassing each other and plotting ways to create 'mischief and mayhem.' Learning from TV that collectors pay high prices for exotic animals, the diabolic duo devise a money-raising scheme to fund various elaborate pranks (e.g., dumping sacks of white pepper into muffin batter at a bakery). The two live in a grimy, gloomy mansion with Pet, 'a matted ball of long, dark hair, similar in appearance to an old dirty wig' Pet is also one-eyed, as the nifty lenticular eye affixed to the book's cover stresses. This somewhat derivative farce launches the Edgar & Ellen series starring 12-year-old twins.

Rare beasts charles ogden