Bartosz Koj Koj থেকে Chabba Sindwan, Pakistan
I wish she had run away...
I wasn't sure about the cover, so I put it on hold. While it was sitting in my drawer, waiting to be read, I had a kid ask for a funny mystery. He needed to read a certain number of pages by the end of the week. I saw this on the new book shelf and told him I hadn't read it, but it looked good, and he should try it. He grabbed the book and completely stopped looking. Less than a week later (note that he'd probably finished the requirement by now), he came back to me, book in hand, and asked what else we had like this. He REALLY liked it. So I read it. :) And yeah, it's pretty dang good. It's told in a noir style, like "Brick" (Joseph Gordon-Levitt film which came out in 2005), using gumshoe vocabulary to describe a detective's experience solving a case. But in a middle school. Where the addictions are to sugar and you get "offed" by being shot by a squirtgun filled with cat pee. It's pretty darn brilliant (as long as it isn't a rip-off of Brick). Kinda hilarious, but without putting down the real difficulties of middle school. It's downright symbolic - after all, major humiliation in middle school really can take you out for all of your high school career. The author also does a great job of using the detective scenario to get to real kid problems. Our narrator speaks of his dad's disappearance as one of the "case[s:] always in the back of my mind" (pg. 70). Also, he's realistic (amidst the stylistic language), touching on how our hero and his dad bonded over playing sports - he talks about how the dad never let the son win, and in fact teased his kid... "Someone walking past might think that he was being cruel, making fun of his young son. They would be missing the mark. It wasn't my ability to catch a ball that we were bonding over, it was my ability to catch his sarcasm" (pg. 105-106). SUCH great stuff. Solid 5th/6th grade boy read. But seriously, you'll enjoy it too.