“I read this for a middle school book club. It’s worth noting that they loved it.
For a grown-up…I don’t know.
There’s a scene towards the end where the main character foils the main bad guy’s escape attempt by precision shooting basketballs through the roof of some sort of helicopter. Somehow this keeps the bad guy so off balance that she can’t fly a helicopter. Imagine, if you will, that Pop-a-Shot game from Chuck E. Cheese, but set to Michael Bay music and Michael Bay visuals of helicopters taking off from a roof.
This is always an awkward part of media for younger audiences. A boy of 15 has to physically stop a woman criminal from escaping, but nobody’s about to write a scene where he stabs her in the jugular with a box cutter. They always have to figure out a way for the kid to stop her using a Nerf gun or fart powder or some such nonsense.
Sort of like Home Alone. Which was always baffling because given the option between being shot or crushed by a massive rolling tool chest, I might have to opt for the shooting. Or climbing a rope and being suspended three stories in the air as the bottom end of the rope is lit on fire? Screw that. Home Alone is an early predecessor to Saw, no doubt.
Also, sometimes these kids are a little overly nice to their parents. In this book, if your parents overspend the government stops by and takes you to a work house, basically an office version of a labor camp. So not all that different from what most adults do now, but I digress.
So this kid gets taken to the labor camp, and meanwhile his idiot parents continue to spend money and go deeper into debt? What the hell!? And, AND, near the end of the book the mom is really hounding for an Attaboy when she says how she managed to not buy a new dress. WOW! THANKS, MOM! A few more weeks of this and I might be able to leave the forced labor camp where they may or may not be doing weird experiments on my brain. Swell!
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