After the man in the closed, empty shop gives James a box of nothing, he finds himself in the Dump, a bizarre world filled with strangely altered rubbish and large intelligent rats.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
One morning, James ducks into an empty store, the one he's always called the Nothing Shop, and buys a box of quality Nothing for zero cents. He thinks the dusty shopkeeper is just playing word games, but when he discovers how the town dump and its inhabitants have been transformed, he begins to think that the box of Nothing might be something after all. James ventures to the Dump, which is now populated by huge rats and gulls and a strange personage named the Dump Burra. The Burra rescues James, and together they decide to find out what has gone wrong with the Dump. It has stopped functioning"gone fossil." They find a black hole; James throws his box of Nothing into the hole, which precipitates a Big Bang. The Dump is sucked through the black holeremade into a Burra universe, and James is returned to his everyday world, knowing no one will ever believe his tale. Dickinson, author of the Changes Trilogy, has written a dazzling story, ingeniously meshing astrophysics with a boy's adventure. It's subtle, intelligent and, most of all, fun. Ages 10-14.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 5-8 Young James is trapped in a weirdly changed garbage dump inhabited by patrols of armed giant rats, huge seagulls, and a sentient pile of rubbish named Burra. He has brought into this strange place a box of very high quality Nothing that turns out to be the key to his escape , but first he has to get out of a rat prison camp; duel a proud gull chieftain; and make his way with Burra, in the form of an airship made of plastic bags, bits of rope, and less identifiable things, to the site of the singularity, or cosmic implosion, that caused the dump to change. Lively characters inhabit a vividly described landscape: dangerous but comically excitable rats; eerie, lordly gulls; the polymorphic Burra, slow and dignified``We don't like being garbage. We are trying not to be''and James, himself, spirited and curious. At the end (or rather, Beginning), James' box of Nothing sparks off a universe-engendering Big Bang, and he finds himself back in his old neighborhood with a parallel set of memories, watching the dump being levelled for a park. A stimulating, multi-layered story, fast moving and pleasantly free of long explanations. John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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