A moiled, disappointingly passionless view of a people burdened by grief and fear after years of unchecked violence. Told that his aunt Petrona is ill, Juan, 17, leaves his family in Bogot† for Punta Verde, her country estate, where he learns that it's not sickness, but loneliness and fear that have prompted her request for company. Fear of what? Despite plenty of hints, Juan repeatedly needs to have it spelled out: Military troops and guerilla forces have become interchangeable in their terrorist tactics and lack of discipline, and the death toll has been rising almost daily. Juan meets a confusingly large number of campesinos, and Jenkins (Celebrating the Hero, 1993, etc.) shields him, and readers, from any direct experience with soldiers or mayhem—it's all secondhand or offstage. Several subplots are shoehorned in: Petrona reveals that she's actually his grandmother; and while revelations about his father's past are changing Juan from an archetypally sullen teen to a loving son, he meets and falls for Chia, a librarian who, after plenty of clumsy foreshadowing, is killed by a bomb. There is little sense of place and no reason given for the violence. Also missing is the terrifying immediacy of Frances Temple's A Taste Of Salt (1992) and, as is found in Louise Moeri's The Forty-Third War (1989), a clear vision of a society in which warfare is endemic. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-67538-8
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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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