Customer Reviews

How To Steal A Car

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kelleigh Monahan is not your typical car thief. In fact, she is anything but a car thief. She shrouds herself in a mix of black and gray, and she would rather hide than talk to someone she doesn't know. She has her best friend, Jen, in which everything is shared, including their co-boyfriend Will. Kelleigh also has the typical lawyer father and a mother who goes all out on cooking and cleaning --- and, occasionally, drinking. What's even more atypical of a car thief is that Kelleigh isn't even old enough to drive. She just received her learner's permit and is forced to drive around with an adult in the passenger seat. But that one day at the mall will change everything.

As Kelleigh and Jen are sitting outside the shopping center eating ice cream, Kelleigh sees a man drop his keys and walk away without noticing. Kelleigh picks up the keys, thinking that she would return them, but something stops her. She never planned on taking his car, but by mere coincidence she finds out that he lives only a few blocks away. Surely he won't notice that his boring car, a Toyota or a Honda or something, is missing for a few minutes as she takes it around the block for a quick ride? While everything is returned as it was, Kelleigh walks away with a newfound addiction that she can't quite shake.

And if you can steal a car once, Kelleigh figures, you can steal a car twice. The second time is less of a joy ride and more of a revenge-motivated debacle. A little more effort is needed to duplicate keys and trick the owner, but, in the end, Kelleigh succeeds in her plan. How and why it ends up at the bottom of the local pond you will have to read to find out.

And if you can steal a car twice, you can certainly steal a car three times. When Jen calls in a panic, Kelleigh doesn't hesitate to borrow the neighbor's car (they were conveniently on vacation) and rescue her best friend. The whole police chase on the way home doesn't help matters, but Kelleigh manages to evade the cops and inform her parents about the declining nature of their neighborhood.

And if you can steal a car three times, why not start stealing cars for money? It's all been leading up to this: her parents' failing marriage, her strained friendship with Jen, and the uncertain future between her and Will. Some girls might act out by drinking, sleeping around, or doing drugs, but Kelleigh gets her thrills from stealing cars. Is she going too far? And what will it take to stop her before she hits the point of no return?

Most people think of car thieves as reckless, desperate, or down on their luck. Kelleigh, though, is an extremely relatable teenage girl with the same teenage problems that we all go through at some point, but she chooses to deal with them in her own unique way. The author's reasoning for why Kelleigh would steal cars not only makes sense, but he makes it seems so easy and practical that it may be a little dangerous for those already teetering on the edge. With HOW TO STEAL A CAR, National Book Award winner Pete Hautman has created another hilarious look at teenagers, and I know that I'm going to double-check where I put my car keys the next time I leave the mall.

--- Reviewed by Benjamin Boche

The great charm of this book is the first-person voice of its narrator and main character, Kelleigh Monahan, as she navigates her way through the confusion and pain of her 15th summer.

During this time she:

1. Discovers (and inadvertently tips her mother) that her father is having an affair,
2. Tries to discover whether a reluctant boyfriend is gay or just shy (because he isn't groping her all the time),
3. Rescues her best friend from a very bad date,
4. Grudgingly reads the entirety of Moby Dick for an English assignment,
5. Gets her driver's license, and
6. Steals a half-dozen cars.

Kelleigh is not a whiner about her life, but through the deftness of the author's stealth narration we are given to understand all the weaknesses, letdowns, and betrayals that drive her to the increasingly reckless car thefts that nearly take her life and/or ruin it. Perfectly aware of the risks, she craves the thrills nevertheless, and is driving off in a stolen car even as the novella ends.

Hautman is a fine writer, who never pounds heavily on a message or attempts to draw a moral, trusting the reader to appreciate the contradictions and nuances of growing up and draw his or her own conclusions. The dialogue is believably colloquial without being overdone, and the characters are quickly and sharply drawn.

A worthwhile read for teens and adults alike.

If you are looking for a manual on the subject of how to steal a car, you'll be disappointed with this book. However, if you want an interesting character study full of quirky details, this book should be right up your ally.

The theme Pete Hautman is getting across is that good people can do bad things. The main character is a nice, honest person even though she steals several cars over the course of the story. Her friend is a quiet but likable person who has a desire to put a dead rat in his enemy's car. Her father is a good person, even though he tries to help obviously guilty people in court.

Hautman also tells us not to use only our first impressions of people, as they can be very deceiving. He keeps the story moving along at a nice pace, and gives us enough details to make the story interesting and believable. The narrator's voice is casual and easy to read, almost as if she were writing it as a message to a friend. This is a good character driven story that should interest anyone who is or was a teenager, because the characters and situations described are realistic (if somewhat over the top) and easy to like.

How to Steal a Car spends a summer with Kelleigh, a smart, kinda pretty, vaguely-gothic teen in the Midwestern suburbs. She's a bit of an outsider, but has a few good friends. She's got a nice family, but they're a little messed up under the surface. All in all - a normal teen.

Until, as the title suggests, she starts stealing cars.

It starts as a moment of passion - Kelleigh picks up some dropped keys and later, for no good reason whatsoever, takes the car for the Disney equivalent of a joyride (to Taco Bell and back). One occasion escalates to another, and, before long, Kelleigh finds herself knee deep in car crime.

The author does a very good job of making the entire series of events understated and, oddly, realistic. Kelleigh isn't suffering under some sort of grand delusion or cinematic adventure - she (as she points out) made one stupid, impulsive decision. Nor does it escalate unrealistically - our heroine doesn't wind up fighting off Ukrainian car-smugglers with a submachine gun. It all stays within the boundaries of belief. And, to the author's credit, some of the best parts of the book are when Kelleigh is doing completely normal things: avoiding her friends, talking to her grand-dad, writing a book report...

Although Kelleigh's foolish behaviour is believable, her self-awareness requires more skepticism. Although the author sets her up as an unreliable narrator, Kelleigh has a tendency to review her own actions with shockingly mature eyes. She'll do something pretty dumb, but then ponder it from an extremely dry, adult standpoint. Although unbelievable, it does keep Kelleigh from becoming annoying - the author walks a dodgy tightrope between teen idiocy and adult sense, but we do get a great protagonist as a result.

This is a bit of an unspoiler - but probably the best part of How to Steal a Car is the lack of dramatic conclusion. Hautman keeps it grounded - however implausible the series of events are in this book, they escalate (and resolve) realistically.

How to Steal a Car is a very quick, very enjoyable book, packed with likeable characters with whom it is easy to identify. Intentionally low-key, but engaging nonetheless.

I have to admit that when I started reading this book I was instantly turned off -- Great, I thought, another dull book about teenage angst growing up. Well, after a few pages into it, I realize that this book was something more. The story is about this girl, Kelleigh, who lives in Minnesota. Like most kids in high school, she goes to the mall, hangs out with her friends, and does typical school stuff, but she has this thing about "stealing" cars. She has a pretty interesting life, and I really enjoy how her life is introduced to the reader -- it's not just dumped onto you in endless pages of drivel where after a few minutes, you're just jumping ahead because you've lost interest. Her life is always presented as part of the plot, and you really start to develop a relationship with this young girl. The (male) author does a great job at getting into the mind of this young girl who, most probably, is not different from any other teenager (male or female) as she struggles with the death of her grandmother, her parent's rocky marriage, and dealing with her friends problems as well as her own.

Hautman does a great job at creating an identity for his characters. Even the minor ones are more than just sketches. You feel some sense of connection with them, even if what you "see" and "hears" are simply the viewpoints of the main character. She has a brilliant sarcasm that makes you laugh, but Hautman also does something truly remarkable -- he shows the inner workings of this young woman's mind - how she connects events together and formulates opinions and how she discovers life through her own actions and those of her friends, family and fellow students.

It's not often that an author can so cleverly create a world for his characters, that, while fleeting at times slightly superficial or fleeting, can also, at the same time reveal a level of depth -- almost like bouncing stones off the surface of a lake. You might just be scratching the surface, but you know that there's something deeper below. While the author doesn't always "take the plunge" he sets his work up in such a way that empowers the reader's own imagination.

Excellent work! A MUST READ!

It's not often you come across a book meant for one market and find that it has a compelling enough story to actually keep you interested even if you aren't part of the core market the author is going for. "How to Steal Cars" is a tale of a teenage girl who finds her "spice of life" in stealing cars. It's a look into the mind of suburbia America and the sometimes funny, sometimes confusing relationships that exist between parents, teenagers, friends and family.

This is the kind of book that teenagers will want to read because the author doesn't try and force a moral compass onto the reader. Instead, he takes us on a wild ride with a young teenage girl who is, by most counts, having the time of her life doing something that perhaps even a few of us have done in our life. During the ride we even get to see glances into her home life, her dating life and how seemingly simple interactions can lead to our whole life changing over time.

I recommend this for any family with teenagers at home you are trying to encourage to read more; and I even recommend it for adults who want a quick, thrilling read that takes them on an adventure that might parallel their own teenage years!

Kelleigh never meant to become a car thief. She just happened to see a guy drop his keys without noticing one day at the mall, and thought it'd be a thrill to grab them.

With a best friend who's always telling her how boring she is, a defense attorney dad who cares more about getting a serial rapist off the hook than what's going on in his daughter's life, and a "boyfriend" who never makes a move on her, maybe it's not a surprise that Kell decides to take that thrill a little further.

But once she's started, Kell finds that the rush of car-stealing is hard to give up. She starts out small, taking her dad's car for a spin in the middle of the night, sneaking into her neighbor's house with an emergency spare key to borrow their ride. But as her parents seem to grow even more distant - from her and from each other - and her friends stay oblivious to the changes taking place inside her, she pushes the risk further and further. And there's no way of knowing how this chase scene will end.

Kell has a distinctive, engaging voice that will pull the reader into the story from the start. Though her behavior may seem bizarre, her reasons are clear enough to be believable and sympathetic. Her sense of humor will bring laughs even as readers cringe at the situations she gets herself into. Her growing disillusionment with her parents and friends is poignant and realistic.

This is a relatively short read, and difficult to put down as you wonder how much trouble Kell will get herself into, and how she'll get out of it. The conclusion is open-ended, which may frustrate some readers, but it feels fitting to her story. A great contemporary read for anyone who loves quirky narrators!

Reviewed by: Lynn Crow

As a middle school teacher, I am always looking for reading material that my students will find engaging. My 6th through 9th grade girls enjoyed this book so much, it eventually wandered away. Recommended for girls as young as 12, yet enjoyed by the 16 year olds too.

Kelleigh Monahan is your enigmatic girl in black and grey sweaters. Her parents have money, she has friends in a town full of malls, and so naturally she does what anyone would do in the face of all this comfort and culture--she steals cars. Through her Valley girl voice, author Pete Hautman's gives us this short, rich, and fast-paced examination of how people find themselves in places they never expected to be, driven there by problems they can just recognize. Along the way, readers discover quite a bit of character beneath the stereotypical veneer of spoiled middle class kids and their parents.

Hautman pays a lot of attention to detail within a tight prose, painting a concise picture. The tone of the narrator meshes well with her identity. Overall, the author minds the syntax and rhythm of his speakers. Even the spelling of the central protagonist's name evokes images; "Kelleigh" instead of "Kelly" signals a 21st Century kid, born to urban professional Generation X parents.

The storytelling is clean, simple, and natural. Whether aimed at children, teens, or adults, I appreciate writing that knows the right amount of words and information. Hautman's prose tends to cut to the chase while maintaining the point of view of its narrator, allowing readers to cruise through the story without feeling rushed, to experience the world as Kelleigh experiences it without being held by the hand. There's no POV wobble, no author intrusions to lecture us on the Deeper Meanings. While backstory, so often obstructive to the flow of the main story, sometimes serve here as rhetorical hooks and set ups for the ongoing drama..

Hautman also demonstrates single-effect storytelling to his young audience. While a number of sub-plots and seeming tangents weave in and out of the story like a car in traffic, it all follows the same road to the book's conclusion. I find it especially apt how running jokes throughout the narrative turn out to have more sinister implications in the final chapters. For example, Kelleigh's dad is a defense attorney who periodically comes up with schemes to save a serial rapist client, only to have them sputter out. As silly as it is, the gag soon provokes the gag reflex when Dad's own innocence and loyalty to the family comes under question. All these entanglements, seeming tangents and side adventures not only develops the character of the narrator and her environment, but wind up aiming at the central idea of the story.

With one unfortunately major exception. While the telling is short and sweet, the story and its characters quickly come to a bitter, unresolved end. By the time Kelleigh and her immediate family and friends are developed and invested in the reader, the journey is over. And after all the adventure, I find the author has dropped me off in the middle of nowhere--ironic given the final line of the book. No, I am not talking about an "ambiguous ending"--I'm talking about the fact that Hautman didn't finish his story.

If beginnings are a delicate time, as Frank Herbert notes in *Dune*, so are endings. Sure, I feel for the waywardness of the narrator and her family. The story built up an effective atmosphere of ominous futures. This may resonate with readers tired of pat and plastic conclusions. However, an uncertain fate is not to be confused with an unfinished character arc. Themes of unending conflicts are not to be confused with incomplete plots. In particular, I feel that there was a lot more to say and discover about the narrator's mother and grandmother that belonged in the story. As the mother is being set up as a victim to both her daughter and her husband's ethical flexibilities, that should have been followed through. After such tight writing throughout, the author inexcusably allows the braid of the story to fray, unwind, and trail off. He casts his characters off rather than risk bringing them to a painful resolution.

Hautman demonstrates far too much attention to detail for this to be error. He means for this story to end on the note that it does. Some readers will applaud him for avoiding an ABC After School Special ending, or a sitcom circular plot, or whatever form of decisive plot end point they oppose. Fine, but the book could still be more complete than it is to the benefit of its message, rather than detracting from it. Less is more, many say, but sometimes less is not enough, too.

While half this review is taken up with the problem, it isn't actually that big a deal. The book works well enough towards its message, and I appreciate the story's overall respect for the intellect of its readers. If *How to Steal a Car* ultimately falls short of its own potential for its characters, It nevertheless stands as a readable example of how to write. I recommend it to teen and adult readers.

I knew it would be a good book just from the title. This book was hilarious and somewhat truthful. Being a teenager myself I found the perspective to be completely accurate. It portrayed the teenager in a way that was both funny and endearing. I highly recommend this book!