Myers once again offers a story of smart kids living out their middle school days as Cruisers “on the high seas of life.”...
The fourth installment of the Cruisers series finds Zander Scott and friends unwittingly involved in an international investigation.
Zander, Bobbi, LaShonda and Kambui are middle school students at Harlem’s Da Vinci Academy for the Gifted and Talented. Their alternative newspaper, The Cruiser, came in third on the School Journalism Association’s list of best school newspapers. Good for them, not so good for Ashley Schmidt, editor of Da Vinci’s official newspaper, The Palette, which received no recognition. “I’m going to bury you and your stupid newspaper!” hisses Ashley, who’s planning on a monthly reprinting of 200 words from the British newspaper the Guardian to borrow a bit of glory. Zander decides to do the same and somehow thinks it’s a good idea to tell the folks at London’s Phoenix School about the pictures Kambui took that place their “Genius Gangsta” friend Phat Tony at the mall when a robbery occurred there. Tony denies being at the mall, and the Cruisers haven’t told anyone else about the pictures, so the British school contacts Scotland Yard, and now Zander and company may be in big trouble. As with the previous three installments, this sparkles with intelligent dialogue and clever banter, all while advancing a story in which Zander ponders journalism, academics, girls, and even the Fibonacci sequence and the grand design of the universe.
Myers once again offers a story of smart kids living out their middle school days as Cruisers “on the high seas of life.” (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-439-91629-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
Easy to read and strong on sibling devotion, with frustratingly mixed messages about personal responsibility.
A boy works desperately to keep his sick little brother safe.
Twelve-year-old Timothy has a probation officer, a court-appointed psychologist, and a yearlong sentence of house arrest. He also has a 9-month-old brother who breathes through a trach tube that frequently clogs. Heavy oxygen tanks and a suction machine as loud as a jackhammer are their everyday equipment. Timothy’s crime: charging $1,445 on a stolen credit card for a month of baby Levi’s medicine, which his mother can’t afford, especially since his father left. The text shows illness, poverty, and hunger to be awful but barely acknowledges the role of, for example, weak health insurance, odd considering the nature of Timothy’s crime. The family has nursing help but not 24/7; the real house arrest in Timothy’s life isn’t a legal pronouncement, it’s the need to keep Levi breathing. Sometimes Timothy’s the only person home to do so. His court sentence requires keeping a journal; the premise that Holt’s straightforward free-verse poems are Timothy’s writing works well enough, though sometimes the verses read like immediate thoughts rather than post-event reflection. A sudden crisis at the climax forces Timothy into criminal action to save Levi’s life, but literally saving his brother from death doesn’t erase the whiff of textual indictment for lawbreaking. Even Mom equivocates, which readers may find grievously unjust.
Easy to read and strong on sibling devotion, with frustratingly mixed messages about personal responsibility. (Verse fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-3477-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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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