Grand & Humble by Brent Hartinger
|
|
Brent Hartinger has shown that he can write
for teenagers: He swims inside their heads to understand what they want, how
they talk, and how they navigate the treacherous waters of high school. In his
new book, Grand & Humble, he shows that he also knows what scares them.
The book follows two high school guys, total strangers, whose normal lives have
been interrupted simultaneously by murky visions they don't understand. At the top of the high school food chain, Harlan Chesterton is a gifted athlete, the privileged son of a U.S. Senator, and an all-around golden child. But lately, his sunshine mind has been shadowed by premonitions of doom: he sees himself choking, drowning, being crushed and buried. He afraid he's going to die. Down at the food chain's business end, Manny Tucker is a self-described theatre geek who mucks around with videos and film projects. He keeps out of the spotlight, but he can't avoid the glare: Manny's being visited by wrenching dreams of disaster, warnings – or memories – filled with broken glass and the stink of gasoline. He's not sure what his past holds, but he's certain it's coming back to bite him.Why does one boy dream dark things while the other stares a bleak future in the eye? What connection is there between two people who walk the same hallways, the same streets, but have never met? These are the questions that drive us as readers, and they're tangled up with the questions Harlan and Manny ask themselves: what has made Harlan's mother so icy, so controlling that she seeks to map out his entire life in advance – the right clubs, the right college, the perfect political career? Why is Manny's dad afraid to talk about their past, and what happened to all the toys and pictures from when Manny was baby? Are these innocent family secrets, or something much more sinister?Hartinger unreels the boys' stories for us with excellent suspense, hauling in the revelations with sharp hooks and a tightly knotted plot. We slowly begin to see how two frayed lives tie together at the edges: shared acquaintances appear, odd parallels come to light, but the big catch eludes us until the final satisfying pages. Grand & Humble is a finely tailored fish, a story of questions and guesses with nothing particularly graphic or mature; Brent Hartinger doesn't need to litter the deck in order to grab teenagers' undiluted attention: he knows that for them the scariest thing is not being able to see what's coming next. Recommended for young adult readers ages 13 and older. Review by Mark David Bradshaw, who likes sushi and nautical metaphors, June 20, 2006 Read a review of The Geography Club and The Order of the Poison Oak by Brent Hartinger: http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0506-011.html
|
