From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up. Zachary is an angry young man who is both attracted to and repelled by the violence he sees around him. He has dropped out of high school and become estranged from his girlfriend, and his best buddy has moved away. His rage, kept mostly in check, explodes sporadically in vicious fights. In the aftermath of one such melee, he finds a .38 and buries it in the garden. He lives comfortably with his divorced mother but has little enthusiasm for anything; his only goal is to pass his high school equivalency test. Then one day he gets a call telling him that his father has been shot during a robbery. As he watches the critically wounded man on the edge of death, he struggles to make sense of his own life. When the suspect is set free because of a lack of witnesses, Zachary digs up the handgun and tracks him down with the intent to kill him. At the last moment, he is unable to pull the trigger. Cadnum tells a thought-provoking story full of rich, well-developed characters. He immediately engages readers' attention and brilliantly maintains the pacing; tension is enhanced as scenes end abruptly. Well written, in language both simple and gripping, this book explores a variety of themes including the attraction of revenge, the tension between mother and son, the challenge of living up to one's father's accomplishments, and the flaws of our legal system.?Tim Rausch, Crescent View Middle School, Sandy, UT
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Gr. 8-12. Another upper-middle-class Bay Area family gets it in the neck--literally this time--as Cadnum follows up his heartbreaking
Zero at the Bone (1996) with an equally devastating encounter with hard reality. Child of busy, prosperous divorced parents, Zachary has dropped out of high school to escape the attitudes and posturing but hasn't gotten the hang of being idle. To pay his mother back for the store window he broke with a punk's head, he lands a series of part-time jobs as he hangs out with a steady female friend and studies for his GED. Tragedy strikes suddenly: his father is shot in the spine in a street robbery. The probable perp is arrested; but despite eyewitness testimony, the case is judged too weak and the charges are dropped. Zachary goes home and digs up the .38 he had picked up in an earlier brawl. Cadnum's young narrator maintains a frighteningly detached tone, talking around important incidents, almost, but not quite, concealing his rage and confusion behind a wall of insignificant details and casually delivered revelations. In the end, Zachary throws the gun away unfired and joins his father, wheelchair bound but determined to keep working, in picking up the pieces. The family's pain comes through clearly, as does the haunting idea that not even the most rational, well-ordered lives are immune to random violence--readers will note that Zachary and his parents hold the moral high ground but will be paying a heavy price for years whereas the criminal escapes punishment. Just? Fair? Likely? Don't look to Cadnum for easy answers.
John Peters
