Dead End In Norvelt by Jack Gantos
Dec. 10th, 2012 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Jack’s summer has hit a dead end …
After being “grounded for life”, Jack is facing a summer of doing nothing. But who’s got time to die of boredom when there are so many more interesting ways to die in this town?
He might crash in his Dad’s homemade plane, or catch the disease that makes you dance yourself to death, or fall foul of the motorcycle gang that wants to burn the town to the ground. Old people seem to be dying faster than Miss Walker can write their obituaries, and Jack is starting to worry that it might not just be the rats that are eating the rat poison …
Darkly amusing and highly imaginative, Dead End In Norvelt is Jack Gantos’s hilarious blend of the entirely true and the wildly fictional.
It’s June 1962 and Jack Gantos faces being grounded all summer vacation after a near disaster with a rifle that his father brought home from the war, when his mum announces that she’s leant him out to Miss Walker, Norvelt’s obituary writer, town chronicler, nurse and part-time medical examiner. Miss Walker has arthritis and needs Jack to type her obituaries for her, but that becomes practically a full-time job when Norvelt’s elderly residents start dropping like flies and more deaths seem to be on the cards when a motorcycle gang threatens to burn the town to the ground after the death of one of its members.
Closer to home, Jack’s caught between his parents as his dad wants to build his own plane and a runway over land where his mum plants corn for Norvelt’s impoverished residents. Then there’s Jack’s nosebleeds, which come on at the slightest stress but which his parents can’t afford the medical fees to sort out. The last thing Jack needs is to suspect that there’s a serial killer at work in Norvelt, a serial killer who may just become interested in Jack …
Jack Gantos’s middle grade novel is a fictionalised autobiography that won the Newbery Medal in 2012. Although there are strong themes of history and the importance of reading, the book in general didn’t work for me, mainly because the plot is flimsy and has an open-ending.
The strongest character in the book is Miss Walker. A strong, no-nonsense woman, she uses the promise she made to Eleanor Roosevelt when Norvelt was first built as a reason to reject the advances of Mr Spizz, the town busybody who’s been in love with her for decades. She teaches Jack the importance of historical events and keeping true to the past. Perhaps inevitably, Jack suffers in contrast. Torn between his parents, he’s weak-willed and frankly, a bit whiny – more impressed with his dad’s war toys than in the kindness to others that his mum tries to teach him. I did loathe Jack’s dad, who’s a selfish bully.
The murder plot didn’t really go anywhere and had a weak pay-off. In fact, I felt that the plot drifted a lot, bouncing between themes rather than tying together as a narrative.
All in all, despite the strong themes this book didn’t really work for me and I’m not sure whether I’d check out Gantos’s other books.
The Verdict:
Jack Gantos’s middle grade novel is a fictionalised autobiography that won the Newbery Medal in 2012. Although there are strong themes of history and the importance of reading, the book in general didn’t work for me, mainly because the plot is flimsy and has an open-ending. Despite the strong themes this book didn’t really work for me and I’m not sure whether I’d check out Gantos’s other books.
After being “grounded for life”, Jack is facing a summer of doing nothing. But who’s got time to die of boredom when there are so many more interesting ways to die in this town?
He might crash in his Dad’s homemade plane, or catch the disease that makes you dance yourself to death, or fall foul of the motorcycle gang that wants to burn the town to the ground. Old people seem to be dying faster than Miss Walker can write their obituaries, and Jack is starting to worry that it might not just be the rats that are eating the rat poison …
Darkly amusing and highly imaginative, Dead End In Norvelt is Jack Gantos’s hilarious blend of the entirely true and the wildly fictional.
It’s June 1962 and Jack Gantos faces being grounded all summer vacation after a near disaster with a rifle that his father brought home from the war, when his mum announces that she’s leant him out to Miss Walker, Norvelt’s obituary writer, town chronicler, nurse and part-time medical examiner. Miss Walker has arthritis and needs Jack to type her obituaries for her, but that becomes practically a full-time job when Norvelt’s elderly residents start dropping like flies and more deaths seem to be on the cards when a motorcycle gang threatens to burn the town to the ground after the death of one of its members.
Closer to home, Jack’s caught between his parents as his dad wants to build his own plane and a runway over land where his mum plants corn for Norvelt’s impoverished residents. Then there’s Jack’s nosebleeds, which come on at the slightest stress but which his parents can’t afford the medical fees to sort out. The last thing Jack needs is to suspect that there’s a serial killer at work in Norvelt, a serial killer who may just become interested in Jack …
Jack Gantos’s middle grade novel is a fictionalised autobiography that won the Newbery Medal in 2012. Although there are strong themes of history and the importance of reading, the book in general didn’t work for me, mainly because the plot is flimsy and has an open-ending.
The strongest character in the book is Miss Walker. A strong, no-nonsense woman, she uses the promise she made to Eleanor Roosevelt when Norvelt was first built as a reason to reject the advances of Mr Spizz, the town busybody who’s been in love with her for decades. She teaches Jack the importance of historical events and keeping true to the past. Perhaps inevitably, Jack suffers in contrast. Torn between his parents, he’s weak-willed and frankly, a bit whiny – more impressed with his dad’s war toys than in the kindness to others that his mum tries to teach him. I did loathe Jack’s dad, who’s a selfish bully.
The murder plot didn’t really go anywhere and had a weak pay-off. In fact, I felt that the plot drifted a lot, bouncing between themes rather than tying together as a narrative.
All in all, despite the strong themes this book didn’t really work for me and I’m not sure whether I’d check out Gantos’s other books.
The Verdict:
Jack Gantos’s middle grade novel is a fictionalised autobiography that won the Newbery Medal in 2012. Although there are strong themes of history and the importance of reading, the book in general didn’t work for me, mainly because the plot is flimsy and has an open-ending. Despite the strong themes this book didn’t really work for me and I’m not sure whether I’d check out Gantos’s other books.
