In the summer that he’s 12, Larry and his friends, Witt and Rafferty, do what boys do in this literary, if not quite satisfying, coming-of-ager. Larry tells it all in the first person, and he’s terrific at describing the bone-deep perfection of long summer days, playing Car Baseball, or Bottle-Cap Baseball, or even Little League. Witt’s father beats him, and Witt beats his sister; Witt copes by trying to find the scientific reasons for everything. His experiments take the form of boyish stunts like sleeping on the roof, and rather more dangerous ones like seeing how much pain his little brother can endure. The climax of the summer comes when the nearsighted Rafferty finally gets to play in the Little League All-Star game, Larry goes to a party and gets kissed, and bad things happen to Witt. What boys do (but not why), bullies, parents, and sleepovers outside are carefully limned, but readers never lose a sense that this all happened very long ago (the late ’50s, to judge from the song “Earth Angel”) in a downtrodden small town near Everywhere. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-38-097837-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
Themes of freedom and responsibility twine between the lines of this short but heavy novel from the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Three months after his mother's death, Rob and his father are living in a small-town Florida motel, each nursing sharp, private pain. On the same day Rob has two astonishing encounters: first, he stumbles upon a caged tiger in the woods behind the motel; then he meets Sistine, a new classmate responding to her parents' breakup with ready fists and a big chip on her shoulder. About to burst with his secret, Rob confides in Sistine, who instantly declares that the tiger must be freed. As Rob quickly develops a yen for Sistine's company that gives her plenty of emotional leverage, and the keys to the cage almost literally drop into his hands, credible plotting plainly takes a back seat to character delineation here. And both struggle for visibility beneath a wagonload of symbol and metaphor: the real tiger (and the inevitable recitation of Blake's poem); the cage; Rob's dream of Sistine riding away on the beast's back; a mysterious skin condition on Rob's legs that develops after his mother's death; a series of wooden figurines that he whittles; a larger-than-life African-American housekeeper at the motel who dispenses wisdom with nearly every utterance; and the climax itself, which is signaled from the start. It's all so freighted with layers of significance that, like Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue (2000), Anne Mazer's Oxboy (1995), or, further back, Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead (1965), it becomes more an exercise in analysis than a living, breathing story. Still, the tiger, "burning bright" with magnificent, feral presence, does make an arresting central image. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7636-0911-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK TO SCREEN
The poster boy for relentless mischief-makers everywhere, first encountered in No, David! (1998), gives his weary mother a rest by going to school. Naturally, he’s tardy, and that’s but the first in a long string of offenses—“Sit down, David! Keep your hands to yourself! PAY ATTENTION!”—that culminates in an afterschool stint. Children will, of course, recognize every line of the text and every one of David’s moves, and although he doesn’t exhibit the larger- than-life quality that made him a tall-tale anti-hero in his first appearance, his round-headed, gap-toothed enthusiasm is still endearing. For all his disruptive behavior, he shows not a trace of malice, and it’ll be easy for readers to want to encourage his further exploits. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-48087-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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