Just in Case

✍ Scribed by Meg Rosoff

• Publisher: ePenguin;Penguin
• Year: 2006;2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 106 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 UpFifteen-year-old David Case, scared out of his acceptance of dailiness by his baby brothers near calamity at an open window, changes his name to Justin and allows several new people into his life. He is befriended by a somewhat olderand definitely more worldlygirl when he enters a thrift shop to remake his sartorial presentation. Angela is easy to fall in love with, but frustrating for Justin and suspicious for readers. Peter Prince, on the other hand, a new friend who urges Justin to discover how very good he is as a distance runner, lives up to his surname. Justins baby brother, Charlie, knowing and telepathic since birth, worries that Justin wont ever recover from the shock of having to haul him back from his experiment with flight. Justins other companions on the journey through the six months between that momentous occasion and Christmas include an invisible dog, Peters psychologically perceptive sisters, and their male rabbit, Alice. The crisis that flings Justin and Angela literally into bed together is a horrific plane crash at the local airport. As he runs from her gallery show of photos of him in shock in the disasters aftermath, he collides with a woman from whom he contracts meningitis, nearly allowing Fate to talk him into dying. Only Charlies visit to the hospital pulls Justin back from the existential abyss at which he has perched for six months. Rosoff writes of these characters and Justins interior and exterior adventures with beautiful grace and wit. Even sensitive teens usually have more psychological armor than Justin, but Rosoffs made him a compelling hero, not a nerd.Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Gr. 9-12. After rescuing his baby brother from an open window's ledge, 15-year-old David Case concludes "just two seconds were all that stood between normal everyday life, and utter, total catastrophe." Convinced that Fate is toying with him, David tries to elude detection by creating a new identity, starting with his name and his wardrobe. Eventually, he refuses to return home and plunges into an affair with an older girl. In frequently inserted passages, Fate actually speaks, and it's clear that David's fears are warranted. Rosoff's second novel, following the Printz Award winner How I Live Now (2004), is an explosive, challenging story that sometimes reads more like metaphysical meditation than coming-of-age narrative. Starting with the wordplay of David's new name (Justin Case), the author's experimentation with story elements to further philosophical questions is sometimes distracting, and readers may feel distanced by characters who occasionally seem more like archetypes and intellectual vehicles than flesh and blood. Even so, many teens will relish Rosoff's wild, unsettling, often poetic plunge into subjects of cosmic proportion, such as faith, time, free will, illusions, and the boundaries of love and sex: "Could sexual feeling be totally one-sided? While he ached with lust, was she thinking about shoelaces?" Balancing ruminations on the connections between everything are the solid friendships: "The answer isn't in your head, it's out here, with us," David's young friend tells him angrily. Readers will want to ponder the provocative questions that wrap around their own hopes and terrors. Gillian Engberg
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved

Library : General
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9780141924908