Niagara Motel

September 15, 2016
A Canadian preteen with a deeply unreliable mother hits the road with a fellow runaway amid the chaos of Rodney King-era America.Award-winning young-adult novelist Little (Anatomy of a Girl Gang, 2014, etc.) spins a bleak tale of wayward youth in this throwback novel set in the grunge era. Eleven-year-old Tucker Malone is a scrappy kid whose mother, Gina, is a stripper/escort and a narcoleptic with a dangerous habit of dropping asleep at any moment. After they make their way to Niagara Falls, Gina has an episode and is struck by a car and severely injured. Tucker is exiled to Bright Light, a group home for troubled teens. His only friend there is Meredith, a pregnant teen escort. "We were a strange match as far as friends go, but magnets don't need to understand how magnetism works; they just repel each other or stick together," Tucker tells us. But it's a dark time. Meredith quickly finds out she's too far along for an abortion, and Tucker witnesses a fatal stabbing. While all this is going on--and for pretty much no reason at all--Tucker is convinced that his father is the character Sam Malone from the sitcom Cheers. So he and Meredith run away in a stolen car looking for his father. What follows is a cross-country drama during which Tucker and Meredith encounter the best and worst that America has to offer. After a disappointing excursion to Boston to visit the real-life counterpart of the Cheers pub, the unlikely duo make their way to Los Angeles by hitchhiking, traveling with a gun nut, a drag queen, and other motley characters. The book culminates with Tucker and Meredith entrenched in the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Suffice it to say that something terrible happens. A very readable if dismal roadside adventure that could have some appeal for Gen X readers or youngsters exploring a pre-digital era.

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October 15, 2016
When 11-year-old Canadian Tucker Malone's narcoleptic, cataplexic, single mother lands in a hospital in Niagara Falls, Tucker is removed to a group home, where he meets 16-year-old, pregnant Meredith. It's the early 1990s, and Tucker is convinced his father is Sam Malone, the fictitious character on the TV show Cheers. Meredith convinces Tucker that if his father exists at all, he won't be in Boston, where the show is set, but in Hollywood, where the show is filmed. So they hitchhike, taking rides with some odd and unsettling people, arriving in LA at the height of the Rodney King riots. Little's story recalls picaresque novels, and readers may enjoy identifying the cast of criminals with whom Tucker and Meredith cross paths. Though readers are asked to suspend belief in scenes that follow an untimely birth, the author (who also writes for young adults, most recently Anatomy of a Girl Gang, 2014) has written a juvenile character that is endearing and full of pluck, and her simple prose, told in Tucker's voice, will draw readers in.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)