The Knife That Killed Me

March 29, 2010
McGowan's third novel is a dramatic page-turner and gripping meditation on power and violence. Narrating from “a gray place,” teenager Paul Vardeman takes readers back to his rigid Catholic high school, where the teachers can be as cruel as the students (“It was a place where you always felt like there was a belt around your chest, tightening, squeezing, and another weight on your head, keeping you bowed down, eyes to the ground”). When a manipulative bully forces Paul to deliver a gruesome package to a rival school's gang leader, it reignites longstanding hostilities, which rapidly escalate. Insecure and conflicted, Paul is pushed further down a dark road, which McGowan (Jack Tumor
) counterbalances with Paul's growing friendship with a group of outsider students, “the freaks,” including his crush. A sense of dread never really dissipates as the story hurtles toward an epic, primal battle, but McGowan has twists in store, making the final scenes as surprising as they are inevitable. The language often borders on mythic, giving the novel an unsettling, ancient quality, not unlike that of violence itself. Ages 14–up.

Starred review from June 1, 2010
Gr 9 Up-McGowan's use of in-your-face reality about high school pressures and gang violence makes the action in this story ring true. When Roth, the school bully, hones in on Paul Varderman, giving him a package to deliver to the leader of a rival gang in another school, Paul finds he cannot refuse, and he ends up in the middle of a turf war. Even the misfits who follow Roth around do what he says because they are so afraid of defying him. Roth's rivals decide to retaliate, and Paul must decide whether to join the fight or walk away. The teen has been struggling with the need to be part of something, to have a sense of belonging. The energy and excitement he feels when Roth hands him a knife are unlike anything he has felt before. This novel about tough choices and the consequences surrounding them is YA fiction at its best."Katie Hageman, Gar-Field High School, Woodbridge, VA"

Copyright 2010 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2010
Grades 10-1 *Starred Review* After introducing a boy and his mouthy brain tumor in Jack Tumor (2009), McGowan returns with a razor-sharp tale set in a school in a lower-class area of Leeds. Paul Varderman is mostly a nobody, pretty much ignored by the jocks, geeks, punks, straights, freaks, and other microcliques, and only sometimes picked on by the brutal bully Roth and his cronies. He gets ensnared in Roths web when he is coerced into delivering a package to a rival gang leader (in an echo of the famous Godfather horse scene); at the same time, he is tentatively drawn into the fold of the freaks, captained by the charismatic Shane. Paul is repulsed by Roths easy capacity for tremendous violence, and he begins to warm up to his new friends. But his morality is tested by his role in an upcoming gang fight and the power he feels carrying around the wicked blade given to him by Roth. McGowans intense portrayal of a teen struggling to fit in is especially precise in depicting the conflicting desire to win approval and acceptance from someone you hate, and how easy it is to fall under that persons sway when he wields power with ruthless efficiency. The title and a clever bit of narrative structuring all but ensure a headlong dash through this book to find out whats going to happen with that fateful blade dripping blood on the cover.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)