ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice “Relentlessly entertaining…an absolute delight.
Booklist (starred review)
This book might also have been called "The Misadventures of Ry and Del" although admittedly not as catchy, it would most accurately describe the plot line of this blackly humorous tale for young adults. Ry has just moved to new town and is now on his way to summer camp, or so he thinks. Unfortunately the most recent letter from the camp director—which Ry neglected to open until he was several hours into his trip—informs him that summer camp has been cancelled and he should not come. So now he is on a train in the middle of Wyoming, and he cannot get a signal on his cell phone, the battery is almost dead, and there is nowhere to recharge it. When the train makes an unexpected stop because of mechanical problems, he gets off the train and starts hiking up the nearby hill to try to get cell phone reception. Upon reaching the top, Ry turns around and sees the train starting to leave without him. All his gear is on the train, and all he has now is a nearly worthless cell phone and his wallet. He falls down the hill trying to catch the train, loses one of his hiking boots in the river, walks seemingly endless miles to the tiny little town of New Peche, and eventually encounters Del. This meeting is fortunate because Del is one of the only people in the world who would, after hearing that Ry has been unable to reach either his grandfather who was supposedly looking after the dogs at Ry's house, or his parents who are cruising somewhere in the Caribbean, drop everything and decide to drive Ry home. Meanwhile, Ry's granddad has taken the dogs for a walk, suffered a concussion as a result of a fall, and does not know where he is. His parents have lost their cell phone and all their identification and they are not quite sure where they are going either. Del and Ry drive to Wisconsin and find neither grandfather or dogs at home. Then they drive to Florida, help Del's friend put the wing back on his homemade plane, and fly to the Caribbean. There they borrow Del's wife's sailboat and head out looking for Ry's parents. Sounds complicated, but the story and characters move readers along at a fast clip and, in spite of all their bad luck, things pretty much come around in the end. This title would be a great book to hook boys because Ry is not heroic, but he is determined, likeable, and smart and gets wiser as he goes along. Reviewer: Paula McMillen, Ph.D.
Children's Literature - Paula McMillen
Gr 7 Up—This is a story of one misfortune after another. As the book opens, Ry, a 16-year-old Wisconsin resident en route to camp, is left behind in Middle-of-Nowhere, MT, as his stalled train pulls out and he recounts the events that led him to leave the train in the first place. Bad goes to worse: he loses a shoe and his phone charger, his grandfather back home is injured, and his parents are having their own misadventures in the Caribbean. A superhero of a fix-it guy named Del helps Ry to put his life back together. Along the way, readers learn that there is more to Del than initially meets the eye. The story is told in a traditional, episodic style, bouncing from one calamity to the next. The narration occasionally switches perspective to include the grandfather's tale of woe as well as well-drawn graphic-style portrayals of the family dogs' mishaps. The style is reminiscent of Chris Crutcher's, and the action is evocative of Gary Paulsen, but the freewheeling prose, quirky humor, and subtle life lessons are all Perkins's own. This novel is not going to be every teen boy's cup of tea, but its charms are undeniable.—Leah Krippner, Harlem High School, Machesney Park, IL
A rich, eventful, and extremely entertaining summer road trip.
New York Times Book Review
"Wherever Perkins’s warm, funny, wise narrative goes is where a reader wants to be."
ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice "Relentlessly entertaining…an absolute delight."
It's easy to fall off the face of the Earth, as the affable 15-year-old Ry discovers when he misses his camp-bound train somewhere in Montana. It wouldn't be so traumatic if his parents weren't adrift in the Caribbean, his grandpa in Wisconsin hadn't plunged into a sinkhole and all potentially helpful cell phones weren't either dead, out of range or stolen by a green-hued jungle monkey. Ry's efforts to get somewhere from the middle of nowhere form the core of this poetic, ebullient odyssey, Perkins's first novel since her Newbery-winning Criss Cross (2005). Three tales in three-plus locales (and the occasional dog-centric comic strip) weave a playfully inventive, even suspenseful narrative peppered with colorful characters and close calls. Details of, say, a cactus lamp or a fly's flight are vividly and often humorously described in a fresh, intimate, mostly third-person voice, frequently interrupted with almost conversational attempts to clarify and refine observations. A long, immensely enjoyable, curiously comforting ramble through an absurd-but-benign world, tellingly filed by the Library of Congress under "Adventure and adventurers-Fiction," "Accidents-Fiction" and "Luck-Fiction." (Fiction. 12 & up)
