Perry Stormaire's Night Out: Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber

If you had one day left to live, how would you spend it and why? (University of Southern California essay prompt)

I could see over the edge now, looking down. "I'm not jumping!" I shouted.

"Then you will die."

I nodded to the gaping hole in the forty-seventh floor. "How is this not dying?"

Gobi gave me another nudge toward the edge and for a second I actually felt the vacuum of space itself sucking me outward.

Outside the building, a high-pitched turbine whine thundered up into view and that was when I saw the helicopter.

"Get ready!" Gobi shouted. The helicopter tilted toward us, lowering.

Gobi grabbed me and jumped.

Not since Ferris Beuhler took a senior skip day or Tom Cruise's Joel borrowed his dad's Porsche for a day of Risky Business has a high school senior had such a fantasy fugue as good kid Perry Stormaire, whose big night out as unwilling prom escort for his family's nerdy Lithuanian exchange student turns into the wildest chase script ever.

It's the worst prom date fix-up in history. Gobi, smudged glasses and all, appears, dressed for the date, in a heavy brown wool peasant costume, carrying a huge matching canvas purse. "Is traditional Lithuanian ceremonial costume," Gobi explains, as Perry cringes in his rented tux.

But Gobi persuades Perry that what she really wants is not a spin around the dance floor, but a whirl around New York City, and soon the terminally dorky Gobi morphs into the hottest ninja chick of them all, one on a mission to avenge her sister's death at the hands of five human traffickers, all of whom are in New York on that one night. From a nightmare date in a peasant costume to a stiletto-heeled, gun and knife-toting assassin babe, Gobi is an action figure come alive to shake up Perry's pedestrian sojourn on the waitlist at Columbia on the road to recapitulating his father's life.

Dodging bullets (and catching a few), Perry and Gobi careen through midnight Manhattan streets in his dad's Jaguar, outrunning thugs and escaping various slaughter scenes--even one with a rampant bear. Gobi's quick weapon-wielding secret agent moves finish off three of her hotlisted honor killings, but the last two come hard, and the two are captured, held in chains in a basement in Brooklyn, finally escaping only to end up in Perry's father's office, where, just ahead of the police SWAT team, Gobi finds her final target, the head of his father's law firm herself.

By the time Joe Schrieber's forthcoming Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) concludes with a blast, one which flattens the Stormaire house and implodes Perry's plans for an unruffled transition to adult life, the reader is cheering for Gobi and rejoicing in Perry's metamorphosis into a guy finally taking his fate into his own hands. Schreiber gleefully juxtaposes top-tier college application essay prompts as chapter heads with the kaleidoscope of experiences hurtling toward the reader and giving the initially predictably prosaic Perry a radically new world view, one in his old life is literally and figuratively blown away, and he sees that there are many possible lives ahead of him. It's quite a ride, one that is hard to put down, as fast-paced as a car chase down Broadway, a serio-comic joyride of a novel that will leave readers waiting to exhale.

We've Got to Stop Meeting Like This: Perry's Killer Playlist by Joe Schreiber

"I think we should celebrate." Armitage signaled the waiter."Villa Antinori, 'ninety-five."

Armitage turned turned the full wattage of his attention on me. "Perry, I realize all of this must feel like it's happening very quickly, but by now you must know how much I love your music, and I think it's time we discuss Inchworm's first album. I'd like to get you into the studio as soon as this tour is over. How does that sound?"

"Like a dream come true."


"Wonderful." Armitage glanced at Paula. "Make a note to book some time at Sunset Sound, love, won't you?"

"Taking care of it now," Paula said, taking out her iPad.

"That settles it, then," Armitage said, raising a toast. "Here's to Inchworm and the great future that awaits them."

I reached for my glass, and that was when I saw Gobi coming through the crowd, walking straight toward us with the shotgun.

Perry Stormaire's dreams tend to switch into nightmare scenarios whenever Gobi turns up. He's met a gorgeous blonde, the twenty-something Paula with glitzy connections to the music industry and an inexplicable attraction to eighteen-year-old Perry. Suddenly his garage band Inchworm is whisked to Venice to begin a European tour and rock 'n' roll stardom beckons. Perry can't believe his luck.

But since that explosive prom night-mare when the dorky Lithuanian exchange student Gobi morphed into an iconic ninja assassin taking vengeance upon the human traffickers who killed her sister, Perry can't quite get Gobi out of his mind, and when in Venice he remembers Gobi's promise to meet him someday at Harry's Bar, he decides to drop in on the way to the band's hotel. Like horror moviegoers  who want to shout, "Noooo! Don't go down into that dark cellar....," fans of the viginal Perry can't help knowing what's going to follow when he drifts into that bar... and of course, they are not disappointed.

When Gobi makes her well-armed re-entrance into Perry Stormaire's life, the reader is off on a roller-coaster fiction ride that reads like the script for an action movie with short chapters like quick cuts that take our unlikely everyteen hero through an explosive plot, filled with speedboat chases through Venitian canals, helicopter drops, exploding safe houses, and foreign agents licensed to kill.  It all culminates in an unwanted encounter with the spy-running Kaya, the CIA operative who is willing to sacrifice even Perry's family to finish off his enemies, using Gobi as a robotic killer to make the kill. Perry realizes that he was the pawn Paula and Armitage used to lure Gobi and kill her off, and  when discovers that Gobi is killing off Kaya's enemies because the CIA has promised treatment to her for a brain tumor that could soon take her life, he realizes he has only once choice.

Fans of the cinematographic first  book, Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, (see my review here) know to expect a script of non-stop surprises and transitions, shadowy characters, and shifting roles between good guys and bad guys which flash by like an action flick in a darkened theatre.

Joe Scrieber's forthcoming installment, Perry's Killer Playlist (Houghton Mifflin, 2012), delivers a killer-diller-thriller, plot-driven, extreme spy adventure, with characters just a bit more realistic than the cast of the latest Batman movie and with short chapters headed up by a soundtrack of Perry's playlist of songs. With a dark European setting that culminates with an epic Armageddon at the top of the Eiffel Tower, Perry's big adventures continue with a tantalizing conclusion that doesn't promise much of a breather for unwilling secret agent Perry Stormaire.

"... nonstop action, romantic intrigue, and everyteen haplessness on Perry’s part remains an incendiary combination, says Publishers Weekly.