From Norvelt to Nowhere

Picking up where the Newbery-winning Dead End in Norvelt left off, this welcome follow-up is as bizarre, hilarious, and inventive as its predecessor. An entertaining narrator, Jack is also a completely realistic troublemaker and worrywart: “Oh cheese, I thought as I followed [my mom] down the hall, what could she have found? There was a long list of taboo stuff hidden in my bedroom. If she’d found anything, I hoped it was just the dried-out roadkill squirrel I kept in my winter boot or the blacksnake skull I found by the garden.” The imaginative plot, which includes a septic tank accident, a couple of shootouts, and a sting operation, provides plenty of laughs and surprises. Well-developed characters add interest. For example, Jack gets to know Miss Volker well over the course of their trip. What he learns from her about human nature—that it’s often completely irrational, among other things—helps him gain maturity.

Call me Jack. Twelve-year-old Jack Gantos has recently read the Classics Illustrated Moby-Dick, and now his life is eerily paralleling that whaling tale. In the Newbery Medal–winning Dead End in Norvelt (rev. 9/11), Mr. Spizz allegedly poisoned seven old ladies to get to his true love, Miss Volker, and now she is out to get him. “I’m going to track down that thick-skulled white whale and then I’m going to kill him. I’ll be his Captain Ahab,” and she enlists Jack to be her Ishmael. Perhaps not the best decision-making by the duo, but then the Cuban Missile Crisis looms and, as Jack says, “Bad choices don’t matter anymore. Since we’re all going to be blown up anyway.” Like a “bug-eyed maniac,” Jack ends up sailing their Pequod—a decrepit VW Beetle—along the back roads of Tennessee and Virginia in pursuit of their quarry, Miss Volker ready with a sharpened harpoon in the roof rack. Drawing imagery from Moby-Dick, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Frankenstein, Gantos employs gothic humor, scene-crafting mastery, and Jack’s querulous voice to offer a wild and challenging road-trip novel, murder mystery, meditation on American history, and love story all in one. The tale has as many twists and turns as those Tennessee back roads or the heart of Miss Volker, who, as it turns out, only “wanted some love before the world blows up.” Miss Volker fares a bit better than Captain Ahab did, and readers will be happy to have shared the rich journey that is the Norvelt saga. dean schneider