Jack Gantos did live in Norvelt, Pennsylvania, so he knows of what he writes. This is a hilarious coming of age story based partly on fact and partly contrived of fiction. This is going to be an amazing learning experience for Jack involving the Hell's Angels, Eleanor Roosevelt, a cute girl with a father who runs the local funeral parlor and the possibility that a murderer lurks in their midst. We're now talking Jack grounded for life and sentenced by his parents to two months of helping the neighbor lady type obituaries for the venerable townsfolk who are dropping like flies. He wants to use the cornfield space as a landing strip for his newly purchased and well-hidden vintage airplane. Jack is about to be grounded and he'll be even more grounded when he follows his father's command to use the family tractor to mow down his mother's prized cornfield. To his shock and the shock of his mother and his own nose which begins to bleed profusely, a bullet flies from the rifle and screams off in the direction of his neighbor's home. He's watching another of his favorite World War II in the Pacific Theater movies and when the Japanese soldiers emerge and begin their attack, Jack hoists an old World War II Army rifle and pulls the trigger with his eye firmly fixed on the attacker on the screen.

Our main character, Jack Gantos, opens the story wielding a pair of binoculars in the direction of a drive in movie theater.

and possibly murder.Įndlessly surprising, this sly, sharp-edged narrative is the author at his very best, making readers laugh out loud at the most unexpected things in a dead-funny depiction of growing up in a slightly off-kilter place where the past is present, the present is confusing, and the future is completely up in the air.Want a book that zips up and slides down and is constantly shifting with humor, gore and personal growth? Here ya go. As one obituary leads to another, Jack is launched on a strange adventure involving molten wax, Eleanor Roosevelt, twisted promises, a homemade airplane, Girl Scout cookies, a man on a trike, a dancing plague, voices from the past, Hells Angels. But plenty of excitement (and shocks) are coming Jack’s way once his mom loans him out to help a feisty old neighbor with a most unusual chore-typewriting obituaries filled with stories about the people who founded his utopian town. Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is “grounded for life” by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. WINNER OF THE 2012 NEWBERY MEDAL FOR THE YEAR’S BEST CONTRIBUTION TO CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND THE SCOTT O’DELL AWARD FOR HISTORICAL FICTION

The dead end in norvelt