Drop-Dead Funny: Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos

"The reason you remind yourself of the stupid stuff you've done in the past is so you don't do it again."

With this salient rewording of the well-known aphorism, Jack Gantos states his theme and is off on another of his memoir-cum-fiction tales. In this one his main character is Jack Gantos, or "Gantos boy," as this Jack is known to most of the neighbors in the dead-ending small town of Norvelt.

Jack is ready for a summer vacation of 1960s boyhood adventures as the novel opens, playing at a bit of combat fantasy at twilight with his father's forbidden Japanese souvenir binoculars and rifle. When he takes a pretend potshot at the evil black-and-white-movie Jap soldiers on the giant screen of the nearby drive-in theatre, the rifle actually fires a chambered round, the neighborhood is alarmed, and his mom is livid. Jack is busted, but he buys his mom's silence by agreeing to tend her prize corn patch, the source of money for the poor of Norvelt whom his social Democrat mother collects. But then his libertarian dad orders him to mow down the corn so that he can prepare the field as a runway for his dream, an assemble-it-yourself war surplus J-3 airplane. Jack is caught in the crossfire between his parents' clashing ideals and winds up grounded for the summer.

Luckily, a bit of respite is offered when his mother assigns him the role of household helper to their elderly neighbor, Mrs. Volker, whose passion is keeping her promise to Eleanor Roosevelt, founder of their egalitarian town, to chronicle its life. Mrs. Volker was named coroner and historian of Norvelt by Eleanor herself, and fulfils this passion through her job of writing obituaries for the local newspaper. Her hands crippled by arthritis, the crusty chronicler makes Jack her amanuensis, making him take down and type her obits, filled with tidbits of local color and history, and assisting her with her medical examiner duties whenever someone dies within Norvelt's town limits.

"Hurry" called out Mrs. Volker, waving one of her claws at me. "I just got a call about another possible dead person--a Norvelt original. I got a call about Mrs. Dubicki over at house number C-27. My spotter hasn't seen her for a week."

"We'll have to look in the windows, and then we'll have no other choice--you'll have to sneak into the house."

"What if she's alive and recognizes me?" I said fearfully. "She'll call the cops and I'll be grounded forever only in a jail cell."

"Hmmmm" she said, thinking out loud. "It would be best if you wore a disguise."

"I have my Halloween costume from last year," I said.

"Of what?" she asked.

"The Grim Reaper," I said.

She threw back her head and laughed her cackling laugh. "You are my perfect partner," she said grandly. "Mrs. Dubicki is going to see the Grim Reaper sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner."

So Jack, black-clad as the Reaper, finds himself poking the recumbent but not-quite-dead-yet Mrs. Dubicki with his fake ax, and his drab summer takes a macabre but exciting turn for the better.

And strangely, there are a lot of deaths among the elderly female founders that summer, providing Jack with both an welcome escape from spending his days reading the Landmark American history series in his bedroom and up-close and personal encounters with the work of the Grim Reaper himself. Then Jack's summer picks up more excitement when a visiting Hell's Angel is flattened by a truck and he is invited by his friend Bunny Huffer, daughter of the local undertaker, to view the amazing remains of the tattooed, nearly two-dimensional body. Bunny's father, obviously intuiting that the town's declining population makes his business a dead-end job, opts to buy up the all of the deceased's original Norvelt cottages, hiring Jack's jack-of-all-trades father to haul them off to sell to a more thriving community.

Then houses in Norvelt start bursting into flames all over town, and rumors fly that the sudden succession of deaths of old ladies in Norvelt is death, not by natural causes, but by poison, and that the nightly fires are also part of the plot to kill off the town itself. Jack's mega-boring summer is suddenly filled with high drama when Mrs. Volker is arrested for murder by means of poisoned Girl Scout cookies packed in the meals on wheels that she has been sending to the town's elderly widows.

Gantos' novels are like no other, filled with drop-dead wacky fun, seemingly chaotic, but somehow pulling themselves together brilliantly, like kaleidoscope glass which suddenly falls into a meaningful and beautiful pattern as it turns. His latest, Dead End in Norvelt (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011) is no exception to the pattern established in his notable Jack Henry Adventures and his poignant tales of a good kid who tries to make sense out of his ADHD life, in the Newbery and National Book Award-recognized Joey Pigza series.

Serious and hilarious, fast-paced yet reflective, untidy but emerging as solid coming-of-age stories, this novel easily takes its place within Gantos' formidable body of work. His Twain-like boyhood stories appeal to reluctant readers and bookophiles, fans of the Wimpy Kid series and followers of Gary Schmidt's and Gary Paulsen's premise-driven character studies alike. Gantos is an original, a literary treasure, and this one belongs on every kid's summer (or anytime) reading list.

"Memorable in every way," says Publishers Weekly, who named it to their Best Children's Fiction list of 2011. Horn Book does the same and says "This is a richly layered, semi-autobiographical tale, an ode to a time and place, to history, and the power of reading."

A preview of Dead End in Norvelt can be seen here.

Jack On The Road: From Norvelt to Nowhere by Jack Gantos

"You don't want to flatten me," Bunny Hoffer warned, "'cause I have some incredible news."

"Another Russian sneak attack?" I asked.

"Better than that," she cried out.

"Well, don't just stand there like a lawn gnome," Miss Volker snapped, referring to Bunny's stumpy size. "Spit it out!"

"Well," she boldly announced with a flourish. "Private sources tell me that a very old lady named Mrs. Custer at house E-19 has returned to town. And you know what that means."

"Do tell me," Miss Volker replied with disdain.

"It means," Bunny explained slowly, calculating the impact of her point, "that you are no longer the last standing original old Norvelter in Norvelt."

It's Halloween afternoon, the Cuban missile crisis is in full swing, and the little town of Norvelt has barely recovered from the murder of all but one of its  ancient founding ladies. Only Miss Volker remains, given a lifetime charge by the town's founder Eleanor Roosevelt to be local coroner and obituary writer.   Although  she and Jack, a.k.a. The Grim Reaper, complete with scythe and the latest detective skills, haf traced the old-lady murders to Mr. Spizz, who vanished before justice could be served, it seems Mrs. Volker is not out of a job after all. When a long-forgotten Norvelt expatriate, Mrs. Custer, returns to her old house, she, too, is dispatched by a Halloween cookie laced with the same poison that killed the others.

Jack, costumed for Halloween as Mr. Spizz and sporting a  schnozz just like Spizz's (sculpted from cadaver-wax by Bunny, the undertaker's daughter), witnesses Mrs. Custer nibbling the tainted Girl Scout cookie and falls under suspicion from the local police,  but  Jack and Miss. Volker are sure that the murderer is Spizz, with a peculiarly romantic motive.  More than a half-century ago, Miss Volker swore to  Spizz that she would only marry him when she was the last founding lady alive,  and now, with the sudden death of the newly-returned Mrs. Custer, she is convinced that Spizz has again resorted to murder to force her into keeping her promise of matrimony.

But with a new mystery to resolve, Volker's spunk returns after its brief funk. With the zeal of her idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her eyes, she proclaims that she and Jack have a special mission:

"A great moment of clarity has saved me.  I'm going to track down that thick-skulled white whale and then I'm going to kill him.  I'll be his Captain Ahab."

"But didn't Moby Dick kill Ahab?" I suggested delicately because she was so worked up.

"Not in my version," she squalled. "In my version I'm Mrs. Captain Ahab and I jam my ivory peg leg right down Moby Dick's blowhole.  Sometimes it takes a woman to get the job done properly." She gave me a severe look that squelched what I was about to say.

"Don't you dare feel bad for wanting to knock off Spizz," she commanded.  "He deserves Old Testament justice--an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth."

So Miss Volker sets out on quest that out road-trips anything  Hollywood has to offer, with twelve-year-old Jack at the wheel of a battered VW Beetle with "Runs Great" painted on the windshield and Miss Volker armed with a pistol and a harpoon with a length of rope attached, in a chase story with as many plot twists as the rocky road to Rugby, Tennessee.  The seemingly deranged Volker tracks the elusive Spizz from Eleanor Roosevelt's fresh grave at Hyde Park to Miss Volker's childhood home in the Utopian English village of Rugby, Tennessee, to the swamps of south Florida. But there is a steely and sane method behind Volker's madness, and at the end of their mission, the dearly departed rise from their caskets, the real murderer and his plot to destroy Norvelt are outed, and true love conquers all, in Jack Gantos' long-awaited,  wildly wacky, comic, and dead serious sequel to his Newbery Award-winning  Dead End in Norvelt (see review here).

In that review I said, "Gantos' novels are like no other, filled with drop-dead wacky fun, seemingly chaotic, but somehow pulling themselves together brilliantly, like kaleidoscope glass which suddenly falls into a meaningful and beautiful pattern as it turns. Serious and hilarious, fast-paced yet reflective, untidy but emerging as solid coming-of-age story, this novel easily takes its place within Gantos' formidable body of work." Those words equally describe the just-published From Norvelt to Nowhere (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013), a not-to-be-missed novel for Gantos fans and all middle readers who like an out-of-the-box read that revels in and reveals the Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy of the human personality.

"Gantos’s sequel to his Newbery-winning Dead End in Norvelt offers less history, more murder, and another hefty helping of zaniness," says Publishers Weekly succinctly.

This Just In! American Library Association Youth Media Awards Just Announced

ALA has just completed their annual awards program announcing the prestigious 2012 Newbery and Caldecott Awards


I am especially pleased with the Newbery Medal winner, Jack Gantos, for his wonderful serio-comic/mystery/coming of age novel, Dead End in Norvelt (Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, 2011), reviewed here only last week. Gantos is no stranger to the Newbery Awards lineup, but this top award is indeed well deserved, both for this excellent book and for his entire body of work.

Newbery Honor Books include Thanha Lai's National Book Award winner, Inside Out and Back Again (see my recent review here,) and Eugene Yelchin's Breaking Stalin's Nose.

The 75th annual Caldecott Medal, given to illustrator Chris Raschka, is A Ball for Daisy. Raschka is also a repeat winner for this award. Caldecott Honor Books are Patrick McDonnell's Me . . . Jane, (reviewed here April 14, 2011), Lane Smith's Grandpa Green (see my November 11 review) and John Rocco's Blackout.

Taking both the author and illustrator Coretta Scott King Awards is the peerless Kadir Nelson for his historical and personal narrative, Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, with my recent review here.

Taking the Theodore Seuss Geisel Medal for excellence in books for beginning readers is Tales for Very Picky Eaters by Josh Schneider. Taking second honors for this award are former Geisel winner Mo Willems for his I Broke My Trunk! (An Elephant and Piggie Book), (see review here) and John Clausen's best-selling I Want My Hat Back.

The Sibert Award for children's informational books goes to author-illustrator Melissa Sweet for her delightful Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy's Parade. My review of November 7 is posted here.

The Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in children's videos goes to Weston Woods' production of Peter Brown's book Children Make Terrible Pets, review posted here.

A complete listing of all of the American Library Association's Youth Media Awards has just been posted here. If you, like me, missed a few of these winning titles, we've got something to look forward to!