The issues-driven plotline is superimposed rather forcibly on the athletic one—but both feature suspenseful,...
A challenging endurance event provides an adopted teen with the perfect opportunity to track down his birth mother.
Still afflicted with frequent nightmares about being stolen 16 years before, Andreo eagerly agrees to join his strangely reticent adoptive parents in a seven-day “adventure race” set, conveniently, in the very area of Bolivia in which he was born. The race itself—which involves segments of mountain biking, trekking, canoeing and even caving—makes absorbing reading but serves largely as a backdrop to Andreo’s stubborn pursuit of his Quechua birth mother’s identity. Beginning with confirmation that he was a black-market baby, his quest leads to involvement with a baby-trafficking ring, puts him in considerable danger but also ultimately brings him face to face with his birth mother, who does not react as he expects her to. In a strenuous effort to engineer happy endings all round (except for the traffickers), Withers contrasts this scene with a different reception given to a similarly adopted teen who is shoehorned into the cast. She closes her tale with a round of fulsome apologies that neatly cements Andreo’s troubled relationship with his adoptive family.
The issues-driven plotline is superimposed rather forcibly on the athletic one—but both feature suspenseful, character-changing incidents. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-77049-766-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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
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