A suspense tale set in a well-developed, if dark, world of hobos.
A debut thriller tells the story of two boys sucked into the underground kingdom of hobos.
In 1968, Glen Roylihan befriends Denny Grabolski, the new kid at school, even though he’s from the wrong side of the tracks. Denny shows Glenn the hobo camp outside of town, and both sixth-graders are intimidated by the men that they find there. Soon after, the boys are approached by a group of hobos led by Stosh “Due North” Grabolski, who turns out to be Denny’s estranged father. He’s come back to teach his son the code by which all hobos live. “Tramps and bums steal and cheat and worse,” says Due North. “Hobos are hard-working men and women drawn to a life on the move, on the tracks.” Denny goes with his father and learns all about flying from trains while evading the bulls (the railway police) and cinder dicks (railroad detectives). But before long, Due North “catches the westbound” (is killed) during an altercation with police—and the fault lies with psychotic hobos who obey no man’s law. Meanwhile, still at home, Glen gets a job at the local gas station with Allen “Socrates” Julien, a Korean War veteran who isn’t afraid to work outside the law in order to achieve justice. Each boy gets an unexpected education about how to walk the righteous path in dangerous times, which will come in handy when the two friends reunite in order to bring justice to the hobos responsible for Due North’s death. In his series opener, Biermeier writes in a clear, muscular prose that captures the gruff demeanors of his characters and their world: “Socrates had hopped the trains home from California after Korea and knew that the tracks hauled just as much bad as good. Many times he had witnessed the bums jumping to the hobo jungle no more than a quarter mile from his door.” The book is rife with violence and other disturbing material that the author does not, perhaps, handle with the proper weight. But the kingdom of hobos he imagines—as replete with White Hats and Black Hats as any Western—will surely be an attractive fantasy for some readers.
A suspense tale set in a well-developed, if dark, world of hobos.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5406-0557-3
Page Count: 370
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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