Customer Reviews

The Solid Gold Kid: A Novel

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Review by Casey
If you like realistic stories, you will love The Solid Gold Kid by Norma and Harry Mazer.
Sixteen year old Derek Chapman, who lives in Central Park South in New York City, the son of a millionaire banker. Derek likes to take the 12:22 pm bus to the youth center in town. On one rainy, April, Saturday afternoon, Derek was at the bus stop with four other kids and they were all getting soaked. A van pulled up with a man and a woman in it and Derek asked, "Give me a ride downtown?"(p. 11) The people in the van gave them a ride. Derek and the other kids thought that the man and woman were just being nice but they were really kidnappers waiting to kidnap Derek. Will Derek and the other kids get out of this situation alive?
I liked the realism of the story because this story could really happen. I also liked how fast the plot went. The plot kept speeding up for the majority of the story.
I think that the story had great characters. Two of my favorite characters were Wendy and Derek. Wendy had come up with a great idea on how to get out of the fire lookout tower. They were trapped in a fire lookout tower and the trap door was tied with chains from the outside. "You'll let me down on the rope about ten or twelve feet, that's all. I don't have to go all the way to the ground. I just have to get a good swing going, swing out and then back in through the iron struts. I'll grab on to one of the struts and climb over to the stairs and untie those chains." (p.143)
I liked Derek because he thought of everybody before himself and wanted the others to live and not get hurt. He tried to make the best out of a horrible situation. For example, when Wendy came up with the idea to escape from the fire lookout Derek said, "No it is just risky, what if the line breaks you could die." (p. 144)
This is a very serious story. What happened in the book could happen in real life. In the story, people were shot, beaten, punched, and burned.
The language that the author used was very easy to understand except for the times when Derek was talking to himself. For example, "Stay calm, Derek. Think. They want to kill you, but you want to live. You are going to live, you're going to live, you're going to live, you hear me, you're going to fight. Fight. Not dead till proved dead. Think. What are you going to do?" (p. 161-162). When I read the story, I thought that someone was saying that out loud.
The book was pretty good except I didn't like the ending. During the whole story, there was alot of action that led up to the climax. After the climax, the story slowed. I think the ending wasn't necessary to the story.

The Solid Gold Kid was a little slow and contained some unnecessary details in the first chapter, but after that, I couldn't put the book down. In the last 25% of the book, Mazer and Mazer gave a powerful and realistic account of the psychological effects of having been kidnapped. This gave the book more meaning and separates it from other "typical" kidnapping stories.

The book is so unusual for a kidnapping story but it is so good. I picked it up and couldn't put it down until I had completly finished it. I have read it twice since then and it just as good the second and third times. I live in Silicon Valley and go to what a lot of people would consider a school for preppies, so I know that the character of Derek Chapman is so realistic. The last part of the book was so full of the realism of the shock of surviving a kidnpping, I had to look up while I was reading it to make sure that I was still me and that I was still at home.

I read this book in school, I thought it would be boring because I am into Sci-Fi Books. Really I enjoyed it. Day by day my class read it and during the middle I wondered if the boy and his friends would escape safely. If you want to know you have to read it for yourselves.

I love stories and movies like this! The authors have a way of putting you right in those chairs, that attic, the van, right along with Derek and his friends. If you're looking for a book that you can really put yourself into, this is the one!

I have now read this book at least sevent times and am working on memorizing it. I have read a lot of kidnapping stories and this one is honestly the best one out there if you're looking for one from the victim's point of view. (It even touches upon the parent's point of view a little bit near the end.)

One of my favorite movies is "The Breakfast Club." If you are not sure if you want to read this book but are familiar with and like this movie, then you will enjoy "The Solid Gold Kid" just as much. In this movie, five high school age kids are thrown together for a Saturday detention class: three guys and two girls, the same as in the novel. They don't know each other at the outset but, throughout the day, come to know a lot about each other and end up actually being pretty good friends. It has been said that the kids in "The Solid Gold Kid" represent a pretty rounded representation of different social classes and circles (a rich kid, a Black guy, a Jewish girl, a middle-class white guy with glasses - whom I picture as kind of pudgy and medium height - and a strong-willed girl). The same happens in "The Breakfast Club." There are the Jock, the Criminal, the Princess, the Basket Case, and the Brain.

The scene that especially solidifies this theory is the scene in the movie near the end where the students are all sitting in a semi-circle and each of them ends up taking a turn revealing their deepest secret and how it connnects them to being in detention that day. At the end of both the movie and the book, there is a certain level of commeradery, friendship, trust, and overall a genuine connection that these kids actually needed to find and wouldn't have unless they were all thrown together in this situation and had to learn to deal with it.

Earlier I stated that the five characters in each of the stories are very similar. Not to make any judgements about them (especially religious or racial judgements) but based on their attitudes about the situations they are thrust into and partially just plain on how I imagine them, this is how I would pair them up across the stories. Derek = the Jock. Pam = the Princess. Jeff = the Criminal. Ed = the Brain. Wendy = the Basket Case. I don't want to influence how you read each of these characters but I just wanted to finish up my comparison of the ten characters.

The two stories are even similar right down to the fact that in both there are really mean adults over them who abuse their power/authority.

This truly is an excellent book. If you're still not sure you want to spend more than two hours deeply involved in a plot like this (and you WILL get deeply involved - it can't be helped), watch "The Breakfast Club" and from that you should be able to decide if you want to read "The Solid Gold Kid," right down to the quote at the very beginning(?) of the movie. Ooooh... that's one to think on...