What’s behind the “ nunya bidness door”? And is that a gun sticking out from Grandpop’s waistband? Reynolds’ middle-grade debut meanders like the best kind of summer vacation but never loses sense of its throughline. And he and Ernie will have to do chores, like picking peas and scooping dog poop. Then, he breaks the model truck that’s one of the only things Grandma still has of his deceased uncle.

Next, there’s no Internet, so the questions he keeps track of in his notebook (over 400 so far) will have to go un-Googled. 9-12)Įleven-year-old Brooklynite Genie has “worry issues,” so when he and his older brother, Ernie, are sent to Virginia to spend a month with their estranged grandparents while their parents “try to figure it all out,” he goes into overdrive.įirst, he discovers that Grandpop is blind. Preteen boys might initially identify with Max’s love of baseball and his nervousness around girls, but they will be too bored to finish his “adventure.” (Fiction. Scattered doodles add visual interest but seem largely unrelated to the text.

The characters are realistic enough, but the scattershot plot and abrupt end leave much to be desired. The hand-lettered footnotes wear thin early on, especially those that explain why Max’s witticisms are so funny. Can he import those traits into his home life, find out why bully Wiley McNaught hates him and maybe kiss a girl? Salm’s debut is a meandering tale with a narrator who leaves no aside unexplored… even within other asides. Still, there were aspects of Mad Max that he liked. After a couple of (tame) adventures with the wilder kids at camp while his parents are otherwise occupied, Max begins to rethink his new persona. However, on the way to camp, Max realizes he will be able to be anyone, to act any way, to say anything about himself that he wants to in a camp full of strangers. Not that Max would want to actually stay with Ben, who has the temperament of a grizzly bear. When his parents announce the three of them are going to camp together for a week, Max initially wishes he could stay home, like his college-age brother, Ben. Can 12-year-old Max become someone totally new at family summer camp?

Anyway* by Arthur Salm