Month: April 2009

Seventeen-year-old James Hoff is the world’s biggest pessimist. He doesn’t believe that all this “green” action is really going to do any good, that humans “have ravaged the planet with our insane lust and greed, everywhere leaving behind horrendous pollution, toxic waste, and lethal contamination” and we are all destined to die slow, agonizing deaths from SUV carbon monoxide poisoning. So what’s a cynical guy like him doing with an idealistic optimist like Sadie Kinnell? NOTHING, because philosophical and political differences finally led to their break-up at the end of sophomore year. But no matter how hard he tries to convince himself otherwise through the writing of heated English assignment manifestos that his teacher Mr. Cogweiller has no idea what to do with, James is still in love with Sadie.  And as he grapples with what to do about the Sadie situation, how to call off his eighth grade sister’s horny best friend and whether or not he should accept his corporate dad’s offer of an evil, pollution-spewing car (“I just don’t want one. I don’t want to put gas in it, I don’t want to insure it, I don’t want to park it, I don’t want to look at it. If I am the first teenager in the world to refuse a car, so be it.”),  a funny thing happens. James grows a conscience and suddenly Sadie’s point of view starts making a lot more sense. But is it too late for this gloomy Gus to turn over a new (green) leaf? Part angsty “dude” lit. and part angry meditation on the sad state of the environment, Destroy All Cars is one teen’s timely, comic take on love, life and ecology. Blake Nelson is one of my fav authors because he writes some of the smartest and most realistic guy characters in YA lit. Plus his dry, deadpan delivery never gets old and often leaves me smirking at statements like this one from James: “Because I have cut holes in my sweater and have been seen reading books in the cafeteria, I have declared myself to be some sort of fringe, radical, intellectual type. Now I must face the consequences.” Ha! A great companion read to this book.

Anyone who knows me is well aware of the fact that I am a droolin’ fool for Adam Rapp’s writing. No one brings the gritty goodness like my emotional hit-man from the Midwest, whose stories of down and out street kids living on the edge of rural suburbia never fail to rip out my heartstrings by their roots. Fourteen-year-old punk-music-loving Jamie has skipped out of military school and is making a rough living in Portland, OR by stealing ipods for Far Larkin, a shady figure whose “one eye gets stuck but…he’s into Star Wars action figures and he’s nonabusive to little kids,” when he gets word that his beloved older brother P, long kicked out of their conservative family for being gay, is dying of cancer down in Memphis, TN. So Jamie takes a Greyhound south, meeting a whole circus of freaks and geeks along the way. There’s Bucktooth Jenny, who dusts her collection of baby doll heads with an embroidered washcloth; Alan Skymer, who offers Jamie a hotel room if he’ll hold his hand and little bit more; the old lady with the leaky eye and “hair so white it hurts to look at” who “smells like diarrhea and old flowers;” kid genius Sam who owns a copy of How to Survive a Robot Uprising and a rubber mask that looks like Keanu Reeves; lovely Albertina with the wavy blond hair and the light blue eyes who breaks Jamie’s heart, and many, many more. As Jamie makes his way from stop to stop and town to town, he writes down all his thoughts and feelings in a series of letters to P that he hopes to present to his bro before he dies. But will Jamie make it to Tennessee in time? This rough, introspective novel reads like a stark modern take on Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road and features secondary characters so realistically rendered that I could touch the scars on their faces and see the dirt under their fingernails. Not for the faint of heart, Punkzilla takes brave readers to some scary and uncomfortable places, but never without a small lamp of hope to light the way.