Bill Warrington's Last Chance

April 5, 2010
This nicely tuned road trip novel from 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award–winner King begins in Ohio, where April Shea is a “pigheaded” 14-year-old girl who experiments with pot and constantly squabbles with her single mother, Marcy. Together, Marcy and April care for Marcy's 79-year-old father, Bill, a Korean War vet and retired salesman now suffering from Alzheimer's. Bill has his heart set on bringing his family together for a reunion, but with this looking ever unlikely—his two sons are perpetually out of the picture—Bill and April take off for California, where April plans on joining a band and Bill imagines he can force a reunion. Along the way, April fends off the lecherous creeps, Bill slips increasingly into his mental twilight, and Bill's children rise above their family dysfunction and band together. The spirited interplay between the gruff but wounded Bill and the perhaps too precocious April provides the most sensitive scenes in this enjoyable first novel.

July 1, 2010
Kings debut spotlights one dysfunctional family whose patriarch seeks to heal old wounds. Bill Warringtons wife died of cancer years ago, but hes managed pretty well by himself until recently. Now that hes been diagnosed with Alzheimers disease, Bill decides its time to bring his estranged children together while he still can. Mike, the eldest, believes he saw Bill give his mother an overdose of pain pills before she died, and has distanced himself from his father for years. Nick is still drifting aimlessly since his own wife died three years earlier. He leaves interaction with their father to their sister, Marcy, a bitter divorc'e struggling to raise her 14-year-old daughter, April, who cant wait to escape her mothers domination. Bill hatches a plan to kidnap April for a summer road trip (with her at the wheel), and drops clues along the way in hopes the siblings will unite in the effort to find them. Part road odyssey, part coming-of-age tale, Kings novel achieves the exact right balance of humor, redemption, and reconciliation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)