When Alex reports that his friend Eddie is missing on a mountain near Albuquerque, even the police pay little attention. Following 12 happy years with his grandparents, Alex (15) has recently moved into a trailer with his mother, a cocktail waitress with dreams of being a dancer. After Eddie, best friend and neighbor, is struck by his stepfather Paco, the boys skip school to pan for gold. Impulsively, Eddie hides; threatening weather forces Alex to leave without him, hoping to find him at home. When Eddie doesn't return, Alex seeks help, only to be suspected of helping Eddie run away or even killing him. Because Eddie is Mexican, Alex also meets outright prejudice among the adults he needs to depend on, including a school counselor and his own mother. Frustrated and troubled, Alex is encouraged by feisty Candelario, disabled by a bone disease, and by an unexpected new ally, Gwen. Finally, the grieving Alex takes a gun Eddie stole from Paco and returns to the mountain to hold a private service for Eddie and perhaps end his own life; consoled by a poem Gwen has offered (``Nothing Gold Can Stay'') and inspired by the life-affirming (though doomed) Candelario, he throws away the gun—and finally discovers Eddie's body under a rock slide. Skillfully integrating important issues into a narrative propelled by dramatic incidents, Mazzio sketches several believable characters but focuses on Alex, a lonely boy forced to make tough decisions. Well-crafted suspense. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-59506-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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