Book Review of Dead End in Norvelt

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gantos, Jack. 2011. DEAD END IN NORVELT. New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN 9780374379933.   

 

PLOT SUMMARY

In Norvelt, Pennsylvania its summer 1962 vacation from school for Jack Gantos. As the summer unfolds, he becomes involved with helping his neighbor Miss Volker with her town duties as obituary writer and medical examiner. Jack still manages to get into many adventures. By the end of the summer there is even a murder mystery to solve.          

 

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

This book checks off all the boxes for good historical fiction. The characters are believable and easy with which to identify. While there are many historical references made, including actual events in World War II such as the battles in the Pacific Theater as well as the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, at no time do these references take away from the central plot of the story. The town of Norvelt is central to the plot and the reader really develops a concern for the place, the people who live there, and their daily lives. Miss Volker shows the reader how people are connected by current events as well as local and world history. She includes events of world history in the obituaries of the recently departed. Perhaps the best part of this book is how Jack Gantos combines fact with fiction to help the reader appreciate growing up in small-town America in the early 1960’s.        

 

AWARDS AND REVIEW EXCERPTS

2012 NEWBERY AWARD WINNER

2012 ALSC NOTABLE BOOK AWARD: “An achingly funny romp through a dying New Deal town. While mopping up epic nose bleeds, Jack narrates this screw-ball mystery in an endearing and believable voice.”

THE HORN BOOK review: “In Dead End in Norvelt, the author certainly puts a whacked-out magical spin on his western Pennsylvania childhood, transforming it into an amazing tapestry.”

SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL review: “Of course the whole reason to come to this book in the first place is to bear witness to the poetry of the language. Individual lines would just jump out at me and demand to be noticed. Lines like … “. . . if you think about it a refrigerator is just a coffin for food that stands upright.” … There are a million good lines in this book.”

KIRKUS starred review: “An exhilarating summer marked by death, gore and fire sparks deep thoughts in a small-town lad not uncoincidentally named ‘Jack Gantos’.”

 

CONNECTIONS

* Teenagers will appreciate the issues, problems, and situations that surround fellow teenager Jack Gantos in this autobiographical book set in 1962 small-town America.

* Books like this one:

Gantos, Jack. FROM NORVELT TO NOWHERE. ISBN 9780374379940.

Gantos, Jack. HOLE IN MY LIFE. ISBN 9780374430894.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
      Infographics                 Infographics is a method of conveying information in a concise and eye-catching way. In various incarnations, infographics can be traced as far back as the beginning of book illustrations. One such example is the illustration of “sunspots in  Rosa Ursina sive Sol , an illustrated astronomical text published by Christoph Scheiner in 1626 . ” (Evers, 2015) Another example of infographics from the 1600’s was Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius , published in 1610. Galilei’s work used infographics to share information about Earth’s moon, the moons of Saturn, and various constellations. Thus, it can be argued that the use of infographics is 400 years old. Some have argued that infographics goes back as far as prehistoric cave paintings or Egyptian hieroglyphs, but I prefer to limit our historical identification of the usage of infographics to the post-Gutenberg press era, from the 1400’s onward. The term infographic comes from combining the t
Read more
  REVIEW OF A BIG BED FOR LITTLE SNOW   A. BIBLIOGRAPHY Lin, Grace. 2019. A BIG BED FOR LITTLE SNOW . New York City, NY: Little, Brown Books For Young Readers. ISBN 9780316478366.   B. PLOT SUMMARY At the beginning of the winter season, a boy named Little Snow gets a new bed made for him by his mother. She reminds him that it is for sleeping on, not for jumping on. He agrees to sleep on the bed, not jump on it. That night, after his mother left from tucking him in, Little Snow started jumping on his bed. When he heard his mother coming back, he lay down and pretended he hadn’t been doing anything. The next morning, after he had woken up, he decided to jump on his bed some more. When he heard his mother coming, he laid back down and pretended he hadn’t been jumping on his bed. That winter, Little Snow enjoyed jumping on his bed whenever his mother was not around. One time when he was jumping on his bed, when he landed on it he made a rip in it. Whenever he jumped on
Read more