Comedian and author Kate McKinnon with the cover of her new book.

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Emmy award-winning SNL Star and strange Barbie Kate McKinnon can now add writer to her resume.

your first book, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science, is a middle grade crime thriller full of strange characters, creatures and devices.

The novel, which hit shelves Tuesday, is part of her “private mission” to wink at young people who may feel “different” as adults, as she did.

McKinnon, whose characters and impressions SNL are legendary, fully admits that she was a “weird” child. She wore a Peter Pan costume to school every day for a year. Later she dressed like Pippi Longstocking. “I went to school in these outfits because I felt more confident… and somehow more myself. “Imagine that,” she told NPR.

As a child, McKinnon shared her room with a number of pets, including Madagascar hissing cockroaches and an iguana named Willy. “I wouldn’t do that again. And I don’t recommend it to anyone,” McKinnon advised. “That means, oh my God, 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 got into because one of us was pregnant.” McKinnon says her mother, a social worker, eventually got the iguana sent to a reptile rescue organization in Boca.

Although her parents fully supported her eccentricities, McKinnon said she often felt like an outsider among her peers: “I just felt very wrong. I wasn’t good enough and I was wrong.”

Then she found her people. “In fourth grade, we started a Honeysuckle Eaters Club on the playground. So we went to a corner while all the cool girls watched the boys play basketball. We went to eat honeysuckle and tried to understand the connection between flower color and sweetness of the nectar. And we took notes,” McKinnon laughed. “So that’s what I cooked, and luckily I wasn’t alone.”

No wonder one of her favorite authors was Roald Dahl; She particularly likes his book the witches, in which the title characters turn children into mice.

“I love a delicious villain. And who is more delicious than the Grand High Witch,” McKinnon explained. “But I also loved that it started with a series of instructions on how to identify real witches. And that fascinated me because I thought, ‘I know it’s fantasy, but he’s talking to me.'”

Similarly, McKinnon breaks the fourth wall throughout Millicent QuibbShe tells readers they can “take a short break” and that she will “hand the story over to the illustrator… and go watch TV.” She refers to Alfredo Cáceres.

The Porch sisters star in Kate McKinnon’s new novel.

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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-quick death (worse)
Burning in the upper extremities
Burning in the lower extremities
Permanent intestinal parasites”

And so forth.

McKinnon narrates the audiobook with the help of her sister, comedian Emily Lynne.

Set in the fictional town of Antiquarium in 1911, the two sisters Gertrude, Eugenia and Dee-Dee Porch have passions such as snails, bats, stones, explosions and building machines. Suffice it to say, they don’t belong in the snooty antique store where girls go to etiquette school and the official dog is the Bichon Frize. They are teased by their classmates and shamed by their teacher.

An illustration by Millicent Quibb from McKinnon’s new book.

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Enter Millicent Quibb, the ostracized, disorganized, well-meaning mad scientist who trains the Porch Sisters to help her save the city from the dangers that lurk underground.

Quibb’s hair is described as “a messy nest of salty, windswept fibers that were thick as sea ropes.” She wears a lab coat “splattered with stains of all colors and textures—a neon green stain, a blob of oatmeal, a matrix of dried viscera.”

Although McKinnon rewrote the first chapter “about 500 times,” she loved “writing about these three little weirdos and their Willy Wonka-like mentor in this stuffy turn-of-the-century town.”

It took her more than 10 years to write Millicent Quibb. She had the idea before joining SNL in 2012. At that time, she filmed sketch comedy for free in the basement of a New York supermarket with the Upright Citizens Brigade.

“Sketch comedy and middle school literature have a lot in common, namely funny names and big hair,” McKinnon Keller said that night.

McKinnon said she hopes her queer heroes make her underdogs feel less alone. She firmly believes that craziness can be a superpower in its own right: “This Something that makes you weird. With this you can save the city, the world and yourself. That is a message that I believe to be true.”