Amazon.com Review
Chris Lynch has long been one of the most stylistically daring of teen novelists, and in
Freewill, his innovative use of language redefines the possibilities of the genre. Strikingly, the story is told in second person. The voice is in the mind of Will, a boy who is moving in stunned bewilderment through a life leeched of meaning by the death of his father and stepmother in what may have been a suicide and murder. This speaker (who is not Will) constantly admonishes, challenges, and questions reality in clipped, enigmatic sentence fragments, and Will only occasionally answers back. The events of the story are dimly seen through this distorting haze of interior dialogue (as the events of Lynch's
Gold Dust were seen through the protagonist's obsession with baseball).
Will, in a therapeutic woodworking class at "Hopeless High," has moved beyond furniture and garden gnomes to strange pole sculptures. There he is disconnected from reality and other people, except for occasional brief encounters with a tall black runner named Angela, who remains sarcastic and deliberately distant. When a girl from the school drowns in what is perhaps a suicide, a floral tribute accumulates around the death spot, with one of Will's sculptures as the centerpiece. A second possible suicide, and then two more are all marked with the strange poles, and a cult begins to grow around Will as the "carrier pigeon of death." A reporter forces him to see the connection between the sculptures and his father's ambivalent end, and Will begins to sink into total oblivion, saved, finally, when Angela and his grandparents reach out in "freewill," in this very dark, very odd, but riveting novel. (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Will, a 17-year-old enrolled in a vocational woodworking class, falls under suspicion when his wood sculptures are found near the site of several teens' mysterious drownings or suicides. According to PW, this novel, narrated by Will in the second person, "focuses on the dark and murky corners of its main character's psyche." Ages 13-up. (Sept.)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
