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Dead End In Norvelt by Jack Gantos
Dec. 10th, 2012 09:52 pmThe 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.
( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )
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.
( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )
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.
