"Dead End in Norvelt" by Jack Gantos

I had heard Jack Gantos read from this book at the National Book Festival last fall, but hadn’t gotten around to it before it won the Newbery Award. When I asked colleagues about it, the universal response was “ehh.” My response is not so much “ehh” as a plain old “didn’t like it.” Some of my issues were based on expectations. I’ve read the Joey Pigza books and liked them a lot. I was expecting another laugh-out-loud fiction book. Instead, I got a thinly-veiled memoir with few ha-has. For me, there was an occasional smirk, but no laughs. The lack of humor, however, was not my biggest complaint. As mentioned, the book is categorized as fiction but reads like memoir. The story isn’t really progressive, rather, it is a series of snapshots of a summer when Jack was grounded. As a result, there are many threads left hanging and not a lot of growth or closure. The “voice” of the book often feels like an adult reflecting back, rather than an 11 year-old actually experiencing it, which drags down the narrative even further. I should have read this book in a matter of days, but it took me weeks because I didn’t feel any pressing need to “turn the page and see what happens next.” The various endings are highly contrived, and don’t fit with an otherwise realistic feel for the book. ***Spoiler Alert*** -- Jack’s father abandons his plans for a fallout shelter (but we are never clear as to why), a random murder plot is thrown in demoting one character to the level of a mustachioed villain, a beloved character “goes to sleep” at the end (is tomorrow another day or is she dying?) and there is a preposterous plan to fly a crop-duster plane from Pennsylvania to Florida (with how many stops??). Even Fantasy and Science Fiction books can have believability if they are consistent in the worlds they create. As a reader, this world had too many random elements I couldn’t reconcile. There was also the issue of connecting to the characters. Jack has an almost flat emotional affect. He reacts the same way to almost every event. Many of the other characters felt two-dimensional to me – there is a tomboy, a pretty girl, sniping parents and a cranky old man. Jack’s mother talks about how sniping is a sign of love, but I didn’t buy it. The parent relationship felt more George and Martha than Tony and Ziva (yes, I’m mixing classic literature with a pop culture reference). The one character I fully enjoyed was not the protagonist, but his odd-ball neighbor, Miss Volker. In many ways, the book feels like an homage to this woman. She is colorful, interesting and irascible. The scenes where she is dictating history-filled obituaries to Jack are the best parts of the story, IMHO. Given that this is a Newbery, teachers are likely to flock to it. It’s the kind of story teachers love and kids, well … We will see if others find gems within its pages that eluded me.