This piercingly sad tale of a haunted family is assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece. Skylar’s resolve to take a summer class at a high school downtown is almost buried beneath her own apprehension and her mother’s irrationally frantic concern for her safety. Alexandra, Skylar’s older sister and sole confidante, offers only weak encouragement, and withdraws even that when Skylar begins making friends with several classmates. Thesman (The Other Ones, 1999) brings the picture into focus slowly, dropping tantalizing hints about why Skylar is so fragile emotionally, her mother sliding rapidly toward a nervous breakdown, and all of their friends and neighbors gone cold and distant. Observant readers will gradually catch on that there is something strange about Alexandra; as it turns out, however real she may be to Skylar, she was in fact abducted three years before. Exploring the public and private effects of a family member’s sudden, never-explained disappearance, Thesman takes a more restrained, but no less emotionally intense, tack than Michael Cadnum in Zero at the Bone (1996), adds a further hint of mystery by suggesting that Alexandra is visible not just to Skylar, but to her two-year-old brother too, and ultimately brings Skylar to the point where she can bid her sister’s ghost good-bye. One and a half hankies. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88874-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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