Heads or Tails

Starred review from May 30, 1994
The author of the offbeat Rotten Ralph picture books makes an auspicious foray into new ground with this semi-autobiographical, wholly engaging novel. His narrator, Jack, travels through the often poignant moments that highlight his sixth grade year, at the same time describing his unpredictable family life: ``Since I was born, we had already lived in nine different houses. I hated that word `renter.' It made me feel that I didn't really belong anywhere, like we had to pay people to put up with us,'' he says. Stuck between an older sister he emulates and a pesky if appealing younger brother, Jack always strives to do the right thing--often to land in trouble. His perspective is quirky but reliable, and often surprising. The first chapter, for example, describes Jack's three-year battle to fill his diary; when he can think of nothing to write, he begins to pack the diary with ``stuff''--bugs, baseball cards, stamps and so on--but he concludes, ``I was covering over the empty white space of the pages in the same way I covered my eyes with my hands when I watched a monster movie.'' A bittersweet resonance filters the humor in these stories, and lingers most welcomely. Ages 10-up.

Starred review from June 1, 1994
Gr 5-8-A book that reads like an improbably successful collaboration between Betsy Byars and William Sleator: funny but ...weird! Set in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, sometime in the late '60s, these eight stories about an appealing sixth grader named Jack are filled with oddball characters and offbeat situations: neighbors, for example, keep 30 dogs (in the house), paint an atom bomb target on the roof, and drive cars on their lawn. Jack's world is not only weird, it's rootless. He's lived in nine different houses and attended five schools in six years-and, some days, it's even dangerously out of control: a plane falls out of the sky and the pilot is killed; the family's dog is eaten by an alligator; younger brother Pete keeps getting injured while in his care-no wonder Jack always thinks the worst and wistfully believes in UFOs, hoping "they'll take me away from all this confusion and set me down in a place without fear." And yet Jack, like the watch that takes a licking, always keeps on ticking, performing acts of unselfconscious kindness. He's a survivor, an "everyboy" whose world may be wacko but whose heart and spirit are eminently sane and generous. Gantos is a terrific writer with a wonderfully wry sensibility, a real talent for turning artful phrases, and a gift for creating memorable characters. In the first story Jack thinks, "I can either be a copycat for the rest of my life or I can be one-of-a-kind." By the final story, readers will realize that he has become the latter and so has this memorable book about him.-Michael Cart, formerly at Beverly Hills Public Library