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Twelve-year-old Nonny Feuerberg's father is the world's greatest detective, wholly dedicated to the war on crime. Nonny aspires to follow in his father's footsteps but, to his father's dismay, his wild side keeps breaking out. Then all of a sudden Nonny finds himself traveling on a train with the magnetic, elegant Felix Glick, international outlaw extraordinaire. Not until Felix has hijacked the locomotive and whisked Nonny off on a quest for the trademark purple scarf of the great actress Lola Ciperola does Nonny realize that he is in the hands of a kindly and fascinating kidnapper - and that, though he himself knows almost nothing about his own mother, who died when he was a baby, both Felix and Lola seem to know a lot about her.

"'The Zigzag Kid' wants to be a literary fairy tale, a mix of fantasy and realism recording Nonny's voyage to the secrets of his heart....'The Zigzag Kid' ultimately fails to compel, coming off as less than three-dimensional, and curiously unengaged. Partly this has to do with Grossman's fairy tale aesthetic, which gives the novel a contrived quality, as if its world were not quite real. More troubling is the lack of narrative tension; Nonny's most profound revelations are telegraphed pages in advance, and his path to self-awareness seems so uncontested, one wonders what the fuss is about."

David L. Ulin, Salon, 09/11/1997

"Some of it is entertaining, but it tries too hard and too extravagantly. Whimsy does the work of fantasy."

Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 09/21/1997

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