Reviews

Gr 11 Up-Gary Paulsen makes an abrupt departure from gentle middle-grade fiction with this gritty story (Delacorte, 2000) for mature young adults. "The boy" is a 16-year-old runaway in the summer of 1955. He has escaped the misery of alcoholic parents (and his mother's amorous advances) to work the beet fields of North Dakota. He encounters kindness: migrant workers help him survive, a farmer offers steady work, and an elderly lady gives him shelter. But the boy also endures the harshness of life on the run: hunger, fear, loneliness. When he joins a traveling carnival, he sees the underbelly of society and has a seductive encounter with Ruby, the carnival's stripper. MacLeod Andrews delivers a vivid performance with a believable teenage voice. In an author's note, Paulsen admits to mining his own life and writing this memoir "as real as I can remember it." His talent with memorable characters and indelible settings shines through here.-Tricia Melgaard, formerly Centennial Middle School, Broken Arrow, OK (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

No stranger to memoir, Paulsen (My Life in Dog Years; Father Water, Mother Woods) returns to a series of episodes he previously fictionalized in the 1977 Tiltawhirl John and now presents the material "as real as I can write it, and as real as I can remember it happening," as he says in an author's note. It is punishingly harsh stuff: 16 years old in 1955, "the boy," as he is called throughout, wakes up to find his drunk mother in his bed and realizes that tonight "something [is] different, wrong, about her need for him." He runs away and lands a backbreaking job on a beet farm in North Dakota, where his wages are cancelled out by the farmer's charges for the use of his hoe, for the tumbledown lodgings and for the only food available, sandwiches made of week-old bread that cost a dollar apiece. Eventually the boy starts working with a carnival, where he learns carny scams and is initiated into sex by the carnival stripper, Ruby. In a mannered prose style, Paulsen serves up strings of studied, impartial observations in paragraph-long sentences. The technique calls attention to itself, as does the occasional circumlocution (e.g., the seemingly endless sentence describing intercourse with Ruby concludes with "sinking into the wetness, the forever-warm wetness of Ruby"). Paulsen fans, however, will probably respond to the vote of confidence in their ability to handle such gritty subjects, and no one can fail to appreciate the author's transcendence of the appalling circumstances he describes. Ages 14-up. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

"Gary Paulsen tells the raw truth of a boy's first summer on his own, "as real," he says, "as I can write it."
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