=Two lone travelers help each other their achieve hearts’ desires in this leisurely, character-rich western from an always interesting author. Melvin Fitchett has spent the eight years since the Civil War’s end haunted by battle nightmares, and searching for his sweetheart Evelyn, who believes him dead. On the North Texas plains he hooks up with young Melvin Smyte, a Chicago orphan with a guilty secret and a profound need for friendship. Dubbing each other Stick and Whittle, respectively, the two Melvins set off for Kansas, discovering when they reach Wichita City that Evelyn, now a governess, and her 11-year-old charge have been kidnapped by a feared desperado. Hite (Cecil in Space, 1999) develops a fizzy chemistry between saturnine Stick and his garrulous, mercurial sidekick as they lope across wide prairies, conversing on topics deep and silly, finding sturdy allies in an old Cheyenne warrior and his beautiful daughter, risking their lives in a quixotic rescue. Though the climax is a wild, fiery, horse-stampeding shoot-’em-up with a generous body count at the end, the overall tone here is just this side of serious. Whittle not only survives a sudden brief ride in a tornado, for instance, but earns Stick’s awed respect when he admits to having started an accidental fire that sent his entire hometown up in flames. Because the good guys are so likable, and the bad guys little more than cardboard figures, readers will find this an amiable ramble, finished off with a heartwarming double romance. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-439-09828-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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