An entertaining and thoughtful robot tale with a dramatic climax.
An android built to take the place of a seventh grader winds up hijacking his life in this middle-grade SF novel.
Seventh grade at Borelon Middle School has been no fun at all for Chuck Bowinger, almost 13 years old. Last year, he was short and cute; this year, he’s gangly and pimpled. Classes are more challenging; he can’t talk to girls; and Bailey Higgins trips him in the hallways. Wouldn’t it be great, Chuck muses, if he “could just lie in bed all day and game”? When his best friends, engineers Rainie Warren and Maxwell Lee, ask him to join their science fair project, at first C-student Chuck is reluctant. But he has a brilliant idea and convinces his friends to build a robot version of himself, who’ll take his place at school and win first prize on SciDay. Rainie and Max solve the technical problems, and the result is C.H.U.C.K.: Computerized Human Under Control of Kid. After constructing a secret hideaway in the basement, Chuck sends C.H.U.C.K. to school, controlling him like an avatar in a video game. Suddenly, he’s doing great in school and gym class while impressing his crush, Samantha Benedeer. But before long, C.H.U.C.K. develops a mind of his own. He wants Chuck’s life for himself—and that’s only the beginning. It’s boy versus android, leading to a striking SciDay showdown. Harelik (Monster Boy, 2017) has an engaging premise, with great appeal for any reader who ever wanted to retreat from the difficult world of middle school while still making a good showing in public. Of course, it’s not exactly believable that two seventh graders could construct such a perfect simulacrum, but the author provides somewhat plausible explanations (“I’m lucky my father owns a small but successful robotics laboratory right here in Borelon,” comments Max). Comic as the book often is, there are some serious undercurrents here about facing up to problems and actually living your life, pimples and all. Chuck also discovers a new appreciation for the warmth and exchanges of family life; even Bailey comes in for reassessment.
An entertaining and thoughtful robot tale with a dramatic climax.Pub Date: April 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73392-732-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Prawn Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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