Amazon.com Review
"Up on cloud nine. A weird expression--and one I've heard about a million times, round about Stol. With him, the normal everyday things often stop mattering." Stol, short for Stuart Oliver, is best friends with Ian James, the likeable young narrator of two-time Carnegie Medal-winning British author Anne Fine's funny, poignant, thoroughly engaging novel
Up on Cloud Nine. Currently, Stol is "out there" because he's in the hospital, unconscious and hooked up to machines. Outside the hospital he's "out there" because he's wildly accident prone (think paint thinner), a "fantasist" (not a liar, mind you), and a gambler (he bet that their teacher would be dead by Christmas): "he's like one of those jesters in Shakespeare who are allowed to mock the king." Stol also practically lives with Ian's family, essentially abandoned by his busy barrister father, Franklin, and his fashion designer mother, Esme, (who is off in the jungle with models to research "lost-in-the-rain-forest chic").
When Stol ends up broken-boned with a concussion on the ground beneath a top-floor window, Ian doesn't know what to think. The novel follows along with Ian as he combs through all his brotherly memories of his dear, eccentric friend for clues to what might have happened. Through his eyes, we see Stol take shape as the brilliant, mixed-up, "mercurial," "bats" kid he is--someone who vows he will only eat enchiladas and gingersnaps unto death, who makes rafts for gerbils, who has unexplained impulses to fall from great heights. And through his stories we see Ian--a not so wild-eyed but nowhere near dull boy who misses his friend. Best of all are his memories of their Ouija board antics, Stol's wild fabrications, boyhood arguments, and the "Only Child Club" alternating with chapters where Ian is sitting by his friend's side in the hospital figuring out how Stol would score on "The Young Person's Depression Checklist."
"Did Stol jump or didn't he?" isn't the central question in this truly fine, quite psychological, even philosophical novel that paints its characters with clear, powerful strokes. It's about those like practical Ian who are "pinned to the Earth" and those like Stol who are less so, people who take care of people, and other matters of life and death. Highly recommended. (Ages 10 and older) --Karin Snelson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Fine (The Tulip Touch) mixes equal measures of humor and poignancy into this novel about a friendship between two very different yet inseparable boys. The tale opens as narrator Ian sits at the hospital bedside of the unconscious Stol (short for Stuart Oliver), who broke numerous bones and sustained a concussion when he fell out of a window. "He looks so dead for someone who has always been so alive, spilling with words and ideas," notes Ian. "If he went now, all his past stuff would shrivel, even in our minds." So Ian begins jotting a "Stol biography." The narrative shifts smoothly between past and present as it pieces together anecdotes of the boys' shared time, and a complex picture of a highly imaginative, somewhat desperate and thoroughly engaging Stol starts to emerge. As Ian describes how often his friend stays with him, sometimes for days at a stretch while Stol's parents obsess over their work, readers get their first clues about the darker side to Stol's life. Other indications come through in what Stol's teachers call a healthy case of "mythomania"; it's "like sitting around a telly that ran a different soap opera every day. He had so many lives," Ian reports. Ian's efforts to protect his friend culminate in a scene that is at once comical and moving. If the adults here come off as a bit pat, the fully rounded boys at the novel's center more than make up for them. Ages 10-up.
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--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
