Luna Boy | Kirkus Review

A vulnerable teenager sent to a brutal juvenile detention center for a crime he didn’t commit turns around four generations of unlucky family fortunes in this tantalizing tale of courage, tenacity, and a treasure trove from Thatcher.Wayside School has a slightly different atmosphere1995, etc.).

Enraged by the murder of her black lover, a schoolteacher turns against the once friendly green town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes Kissin Kate Barlow, a feared bandit, and reveals where she buried her stash. I die laughing. After centuries without rain, the lake and town became a memory. But with the involuntary help of a group of juvenile delinquents, the last descendants of the last inhabitants continue to dig. Stanley Yelnats IV is the great-grandson of one of Kissin’ Kate’s victims and the last to fall under his family’s curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Under the direction of the Warden, a woman whose long fingernails are coated with rattlesnake venom, Stanley and his fellow prisoners dig holes into the rock-hard lake bed every day. After weeks of hard labor, Stanley digs up his clue, but he is smart enough to hide the information about which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Thatcher weaves an intricate web of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations, portraying slightly larger-than-life characters in harsh sunlight that leaves readers reaching for their water bottles. Expose it below.

In the end, both the good guys and the bad guys get nothing but desert, but Stanley has plenty of opportunities to display courage and bravery in this grueling and absorbing adventure.

(Fiction. 9-13)