A contrived romance/mystery with an anticlimactic ending and exaggerated, two-dimensional characters. Coming into a small Pacific coast town to help close her deceased grandmother’s house, Jane Douglas glimpses a gray-eyed boy, and can’t get him out of her mind. She throws sensibility to the winds and joins her brassy, malicious cousin Ricki in sneaking out at night to meet him at a shabby local amusement park, where she learns that his name is Carey, and that he’s just as fascinated by her. By day, Jane watches in puzzlement as her mother, Abby, is manipulated and insulted by Ricki’s shrill, selfish mother, Norma. Thesman pumps suspense into the story with hints of a skeleton in the family closet, odd behavior, threats open and veiled, enigmatic undertones, and ominous parallels between past and present events, but none of it comes to much. When Jane’s anger at Ricki and Norma outweighs her desire to see Carey, she hustles her mother away, headed for home. Romance-minded readers will sigh over Jane’s and Carey’s moonlight trysts, but the relentlessly hateful behavior of Norma and Ricki turns them into caricatures, and the Douglas’s escape leaves all the carefully produced tension unreleased. It’s a step back for Thesman (The Storyteller’s Daughter, 1997, etc.), who shows better skills and a surer hand with character in all her previous novels. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87959-2
Page Count: 159
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
Paulsen recalls personal experiences that he incorporated into Hatchet (1987) and its three sequels, from savage attacks by moose and mosquitoes to watching helplessly as a heart-attack victim dies. As usual, his real adventures are every bit as vivid and hair-raising as those in his fiction, and he relates them with relish—discoursing on “The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition,” for instance: “Something that you would never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.” Specific examples follow, to prove that he knows whereof he writes. The author adds incidents from his Iditarod races, describes how he made, then learned to hunt with, bow and arrow, then closes with methods of cooking outdoors sans pots or pans. It’s a patchwork, but an entertaining one, and as likely to win him new fans as to answer questions from his old ones. (Autobiography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32650-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)
An exhilarating summer marked by death, gore and fire sparks deep thoughts in a small-town lad not uncoincidentally named “Jack Gantos.”
The gore is all Jack’s, which to his continuing embarrassment “would spray out of my nose holes like dragon flames” whenever anything exciting or upsetting happens. And that would be on every other page, seemingly, as even though Jack’s feuding parents unite to ground him for the summer after several mishaps, he does get out. He mixes with the undertaker’s daughter, a band of Hell’s Angels out to exact fiery revenge for a member flattened in town by a truck and, especially, with arthritic neighbor Miss Volker, for whom he furnishes the “hired hands” that transcribe what becomes a series of impassioned obituaries for the local paper as elderly town residents suddenly begin passing on in rapid succession. Eventually the unusual body count draws the—justified, as it turns out—attention of the police. Ultimately, the obits and the many Landmark Books that Jack reads (this is 1962) in his hours of confinement all combine in his head to broaden his perspective about both history in general and the slow decline his own town is experiencing.
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-37993-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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