The Baby and Fly Pie - Softcover

Melvin Burgess

3.57

138 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140369821 ISBN 13: 9780140369823

Publisher: Puffin, 1995

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SOLD Review - Totally gripping and charged with intense emotion. --Mail on Sunday --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition. Book A new edition of this Melvin Burgess classic. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition. See all Inside This Book (Learn More) First SentenceIt began with a lorry load of fish.&nbspRead the first page Browse Sample PagesFront Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover Search inside this book:

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About the Author:

Melvin Burgess is regarded as one of the best writers in contemporary children's literature. In 1997 his controversial bestseller Junk won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. It was also shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread Children's Book of the Year. Four of his novels have been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal: The Cry of the Wolf, And Angel for May, The Baby and the Fly Pie and The Ghost Behind the Wall. Melvin lives in Manchester with his two children.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 6-10?London of the future is a bleak, desperate, polluted place for Davey, known as Fly Pie, and his friend Sham, orphaned boys who spend their days scouring an enormous dump for wares to salvage. One day they discover, hiding in an old warehouse, a wounded gunman with a kidnapped baby, and they learn that a 17 million pound ransom has been demanded for the child's safe return. When the man dies, Fly Pie's sister Jane (who had recently been sold into prostitution) joins the boys in a scheme to sequester the baby until they can locate its family and then try to claim a reward. In an effort to escape capture, they flee to a squatter city outside London, set up a miserable tent in the mud, and learn the identity of the child. The baby is old enough to splash gleefully in puddles, but seems conveniently objectified and immobile much of the time, an unrealistic element in Fly Pie's first-person narrative. As the adolescents experience continuing discord and fear of treachery among themselves, the pace begins to drag, but Jane takes a leadership role and arranges a rendezvous. "Treasure is dreams and even when you know you should, you can't let dreams go" muses Fly Pie as he fantasizes about life as more than a "rubbish kid." So they prepare?with equal measures of hope and fear?for the face-to-face meeting with the baby's mother, knowing that even though they aspire to do what is right, they may well be tracked down as heartless kidnappers. The ambiguous ending is a fitting conclusion to this intriguing, dark tale.?Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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