by Pete Hautman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
In a cutting and comic gem, Bo Marsten is in trouble with the law: He’s insulted a classmate, neglected to take his anti-anger medication and gone running without kneepad liners (required to prevent chafing). In 2076, in the United Safer States of America, it’s illegal to do anything dangerous. Provoked by the smarmy rival for a girl’s affections, Bo commits crime after crime, culminating in an ineffectual and feeble fistfight. For such an outrageous offense, he’s exiled to juvenile prison. In a McDonald’s prison colony surrounded by man-eating polar bears, Bo assembles pizzas, while a surreal artificial intelligence named Bork tries to spring Bo from jail. But Bo’s prison experience has a different twist. The sadistic warden has a fetish for the illegal game of football, and the most athletic criminals get perks in return for playing the violent sport. If Bo manages to survive the bone-crushing football games, the homicidal warden and the hungry polar bears, he might just learn something. Bitingly funny and unexpectedly heartwarming, Bo’s coming-of-age is a winner. (Science fiction. 13-15)
Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-689-86801-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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by Adam Rapp ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 1999
Envisioning a nightmarish future in which children deemed small or otherwise defective are worked to death breaking rocks, and the constant rain is so acid it raises blisters, Rapp (Buffalo Tree, 1997) crafts another lurid shocker. Learning that the coffin maker who has housed her is about to sell her off, 11-year-old Whensday, also known as “33” for the tattoo on her arm, sneaks away. Cataloging the disease, excrement, blood, vomit, mutations, slime, and general filth with matter-of-fact bluntness, she takes temporary shelter from the rain with Honeycut, a huge, dimwitted teenager; tries to escape with another fugitive who dies of ebola-like Blackfrost; is raped by an officer of the brutal local militia; and sees Honeycut stoned to death for killing the man. Whensday tells her tale in a colorful idiolect, mixing dreams and scatological exchanges with Oakley, a tough-talking younger friend. Certain she’s about to die since she can’t stop vomiting, Whensday is rescued by a hidden community of women who clean her up and tell her she’s pregnant—a happy ending, under the circumstances. Often gripping, sometimes blackly funny in a squalid way, this will remind readers of Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker (1980) and other tales of post-apocalyptic devastation. (Fiction. 13-15)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1999
ISBN: 1-886910-42-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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by Sid Hite ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1999
Despite the title, Hite’s latest is no sci-fi, futuristic effort, but a modern novel with a first-person narrative with echoes of such classics as Catcher in the Rye. Cecil lives in “historic” Bricksburg, a Virginia backwater made up of colorful eccentrics, where the biggest excitement is over who altered a local sign to read “Welcome to Hysteric Pricksburg.” Such vandalism is of felony proportions, and the leading suspect happens to be Cecil’s best friend, Isaac, who maintains his innocence as well as his cool. Throw in Cecil’s romantic struggle between the town’s fickle bombshell and the girl-next-door, Isaac’s younger sister, and this has all the makings of a conventional read; it transcends such labels with the addition of Hite’s keen sense of the absurd, Cecil’s mature, witty observations and his morose pronouncements about life on Earth. Cecil’s ongoing discourse on the problems of the universe grow trying, but readers will relate to—and laugh over—his simple struggle to find his way. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-5055-8
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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