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Library Journal
Reviewed on January 2, 2014 | Fiction
Since Gantos has already won the Newbery for the hilarious Dead End in Norvelt (Farrar, 2011), one might think that he would be content to leave his fictional self and the wholly original Miss Volker to the confines of near history. Not so ...Log In or Sign Up to Read More
Horn Book Magazine
Reviewed on September 1, 2013
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...Log In or Sign Up to Read More
Horn Book Guide
Reviewed on January 1, 2013
Drawing imagery from <i>Moby-Dick</i>, <i>Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i>, and <i>Frankenstein</i>, Gantos employs gothic humor, scene-craft...Log In or Sign Up to Read More
Junior Library Guild
Reviewed on October 1, 2013
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 coul...Log In or Sign Up to Read More
