Freewill - Hardcover
Why Are You Here?
Will is supposed to be a pilot, to skim above surfaces. But instead he's in wood shop. He doesn't know why -- or maybe he just doesn't want to admit the truth.
What Are You Doing?He used to make beautiful things: gnomes, whirligigs, furniture. Now he's making strange wooden totems that seem to serve no purpose.
What Do You Know?When a series of teen suicides occurs in town, they all have one thing in common: beautifully carved wooden tributes that appear just after or just before the deaths.
What Will You Do?Will's afraid he knows who's repsonsible for the deaths. And lurking just behind that knowledge is another secret, so explosive that he might not be able to face it and live....
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Review:
Chris Lynch has long been one of the most stylistically daring of teen novelists, and in Freewill, his innovative use of language redefines the possibilities of the genre. Strikingly, the story is told in second person. The voice is in the mind of Will, a boy who is moving in stunned bewilderment through a life leeched of meaning by the death of his father and stepmother in what may have been a suicide and murder. This speaker (who is not Will) constantly admonishes, challenges, and questions reality in clipped, enigmatic sentence fragments, and Will only occasionally answers back. The events of the story are dimly seen through this distorting haze of interior dialogue (as the events of Lynch's Gold Dust were seen through the protagonist's obsession with baseball).
About the Author:
Will, in a therapeutic woodworking class at "Hopeless High," has moved beyond furniture and garden gnomes to strange pole sculptures. There he is disconnected from reality and other people, except for occasional brief encounters with a tall black runner named Angela, who remains sarcastic and deliberately distant. When a girl from the school drowns in what is perhaps a suicide, a floral tribute accumulates around the death spot, with one of Will's sculptures as the centerpiece. A second possible suicide, and then two more are all marked with the strange poles, and a cult begins to grow around Will as the "carrier pigeon of death." A reporter forces him to see the connection between the sculptures and his father's ambivalent end, and Will begins to sink into total oblivion, saved, finally, when Angela and his grandparents reach out in "freewill," in this very dark, very odd, but riveting novel. (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell
Chris Lynch is the Printz Honor Award-winning author of several highly acclaimed young adult novels, including Freewill, Gold Dust, Iceman, Gypsy Davy, and Shadowboxer, all ALA Best Books for Young Adults. He is also the author of Extreme Elvin, Whitechurch, and All The Old Haunts. He holds an M.A. from the writing program at Emerson College. He mentors aspiring writers and continues to work on new literary projects. He lives in Boston and in Scotland.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherPerfection Learning
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0756919347
- ISBN 13 9780756919344
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages148
- Rating
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