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GUS AND GRANDPA AND THE TWO-WHEELED BIKE by Claudia Mills

GUS AND GRANDPA AND THE TWO-WHEELED BIKE

by Claudia Mills

Pub Date: March 5th, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-32821-8
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Gus and Grandpa (Gus and Grandpa Ride the Train, 1998, etc.) return, this time to tackle that classic coming-of-age moment: when the training wheels come off. Gus is a happy cyclist until Ryan, new in the neighborhood and about Gus’s age, rides by on his racing bike and asks Gus why he still uses training wheels. Gus loves his training wheels, which stabilize an otherwise “tippy, slippy, floppy, falling-over bike.” Gus’s father asks if Gus wants to remove his training wheels; Gus says no. In a rather interfering manner, his father buys him a new bike that proves to be Gus’s nemesis. He keeps crashing, and has the banged-up knees to prove it. Grandpa has an idea. He rolls out Gus’s father’s old bike, a sort of intermediate model between training-wheels and Gus’s new bike. Then Grandpa holds on to the back of the seat as Gus rides around a parking lot a “million” times and starts to feel the wind in his sails. Sweet and mellow: Mills (and Stock, of course) hits the right degree of fear without having to revert to terror to delineate the importance of Gus’s act, and Grandpa is no saint, just a gentleman who understands the notion of patience’something his son is still working on. (Fiction. 6-9)