From Norvelt to Nowhere
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
This town is haunted by more than just ghosts . . .
When Jack dresses up as a notorious local murderer for Halloween, he thinks he’s found the perfect costume to scare away evil spirits. But when the real murderer returns and another old lady dies, he starts to worry that he might not be showing the best judgment.
Together with Miss Volker, the last remaining original Norvelter, Jack sets out on a road trip through the dark side of America’s history to track down the killer once and for all.
Will they save Norvelt? Or are they going nowhere?
From Norvelt to Nowhere is Jack Gantos’s hilarious follow-up to Dead End in Norvelt, winner of the Newbery Medal and shortlisted for the 2012 Guardian Children’s Prize.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gantos's sequel to his Newbery-winning Dead End in Norvelt offers less history, more murder, and another hefty helping of zaniness. An explosion shuts school for repairs, leaving Jackie, 12, free to accompany Miss Volker to Hyde Park, N.Y., to pay last respects to Norvelt's recently deceased founder, Eleanor Roosevelt. Death (and a detective) seem to shadow Jackie around every bend: Mr. Spizz, the murder suspect from Dead End in Norvelt, is still at large when a new victim dies, and the travelers head to Florida when Miss Volker learns her twin sister has expired (she suspects foul play). During their road trip, Jackie reads Classics Illustrated comics that his mother has forbidden. "Those," she tells him, "are what cheaters and idiots read." But Miss Volker uses Jackie's reading as a springboard to examine the life she's lived, confessing her own Jekyll and Hyde personality and drawing a hilarious analogy between herself and Spizz to Ahab and his whale. The anxieties of the Cold War recede, overshadowed by these two larger-than-life characters bent on bringing a murderer to justice in the kookiest way possible. Ages 10 14.
