This story is full of surprises, so I won’t tell you too
much about the plot – part of the fun is seeing it unfold. Fourteen-year old
Jason lives in a small town somewhere in the center of the US – basically, the
middle of nowhere. Jason has a good life with his parents and friends, but
mostly, he is just bored. He feels like nothing exciting ever happens in his
pathetic town:
“If God threw a dart at the world and it happened to strike Billington, completely obliterating it, no would notice and no one would care. In fact, I often thought it would be the best thing that could happen to this place. Smack in the middle of the state, Billington is on a highway that couldn’t be straighter if you drew it with a ruler, and whenever I heard people talk about going nowhere fast, I figured they were headed here, although I couldn’t see what the hurry would be. We’ve got your typical fast-food places, an uninspired mall, and way too many satellite dishes – because in a place like this, what else is there to do but watch five hundred channels of TV? If boredom was a living, breathing thing, then its less interesting cousin would be Billington.”
You get the picture. So, Jason’s boring life continues until
one of his best friends dies from appendicitis, and his school’s eccentric
janitor gives him a strange gift. From there, things just get weirder and
weirder, as Jason begins to realize that very strange things are going on in
his boring little town – things that may have never happened anywhere else on
earth.
It’s a fun, fast adventure with a lot of warmth and heart at
its core. Schusterman’s wild imagination is in full swing here. He has also
created a likable and unlikely hero in Jason; I tore through this novel in just
a few days, hoping things would turn out OK for him in the end. You'll have to read it to find out for yourself!
230 pages, Simon & Schuster
No comments:
Post a Comment