Amazon.com: Escape, Return, Breakout (The White Fox Chronicles): Gary Paulsen: Books

Amazon.com
Fourteen-year-old Cody Pierce, a.k.a. the White Fox, is on a mission. After 18 months in the evil CCR (Confederation of Consolidated Republics) prison camp, Cody makes an ingenious escape and embarks on a plan to carry out his revenge and liberate the children remaining in the camp. The year is 2057, and the USA has been overcome by the brutal tactics of the CCR. But pockets of Americans are building up their strength (and arsenals of weapons), waiting for their chance to fight back. With the White Fox's brilliant, ethical (except when it comes to settling certain scores with CCR's particularly heinous leaders), military mind, the downtrodden Americans may just have a chance.

Intense, violent, and visual, Gary Paulsen's futuristic novel reads like a summertime blockbuster movie. There's even the slightest hint of future romance, with a girl named Rachel who Cody encounters in his escapades. The CCR is more than vaguely reminiscent of Americans' cold-war-era view of communist Russia's evil empire, with a bit of Nazism thrown in for good, wicked measure. Paulsen is the extremely prolific and distinguished author of many critically acclaimed books, including three Newbery Honor titles: Hatchet, Dog Song, and The Winter Room. As a movie, this one might be rated PG13. (Ages 10 to 14) --Emilie Coulter

From Publishers Weekly
Plotted much like a shoot-'em-up computer game, this often violent adventure shows the Newbery Honor author at his least literary. It is 2057, and the Confederation of Consolidated Republics (CCR) has decimated the United States (America's downfall, readers learn, has been precipitated by military cutbacks and the elimination of the CIA). The eponymous White Fox is Cody Pierce, a 14-year-old whose intelligence, ability to master military skills and sheer endurance would make him the envy of even a comic-book superhero (a comparison underscored by the graphics-style cover treatment). Confined to a prison camp and supposedly being indoctrinated in CCR thinking, "in a cleansing experiment much like the one Hitler had tried with the youth of Germany," Cody has actually been hatching an escape plan. When a U.S. pilot from a well-organized resistance unit is captured and brought to the prison, Cody knows he must save her along with himself. The story line hurtles through hairbreadth rescues and encounters with loyal American fighters and bloodcurdlingly evil CCR soldiers as Cody shoots, punches and detonates his way out of the prison camp and back again, to even the score with his former captors. The dialogue is pure B-movie ("What is this foolish patriotism you Americans possess? Why would you be willing to be tortured?") and, as in a B-movie, readers can cheer on the good guys without ever fearing that they might not triumph in the end. Ages 9-14. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Escape, Return, Breakout (The White Fox Chronicles) (Hardcover)

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