Reaching Dustin - Hardcover

Grove, Vicki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399230084 ISBN 13: 9780399230080

Publisher: Putnam Juvenile, 1998

Synopsis

Angry at having to interview the peevish, sullen Dustin for her sixth-grade writing assignment, Carly begins to discover the reasons behind Dustin's mean disposition, which include his mother's suicide and his father's criminal career.

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Reviews

Grade 5-8AAn interview assignment forces Carly to get to know Dustin Groat, the most unpopular member of her sixth-grade class. Dustin's unsociable behavior began at school in third grade, just after his mother died, and Carly and her friends have looked down upon him ever since. The Groats are notorious troublemakers, correctly suspected of hoarding guns on their isolated compound and making drugs. As she learns about his family background and history-not from Dustin, but through her own family and research-she gradually realizes that there's more to the boy than she assumed. Grove neatly weaves several subplots into the story, all related in some way to Carly's relationship with her nemesis. As she slowly gathers the courage and empathy to befriend the boy, she also begins to see her own friends and family with new clarity. Readers will recognize that she treats Dustin too harshly from the start, but her stubbornness rings true since she lives with the buried guilt of how she wronged him in the past. Carly's inner development is convincingly painful as she realizes the part she played in creating Dustin's problems. The resolution is nearly too pat, as Carly clears her own conscience by reading her eloquent and insightful essay about Dustin to her class. Then she writes an article about him in the school newspaper, which helps win his trust. These strategies fit the girl's personality, though, since she loves to write more than anything. The final paragraph, in which Dustin finally agrees to accept Carly's help, resonates with hope without minimizing the difficulties of the boy's family situation.ASteven Engelfried, West Linn Public Library, OR
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The swamp-dwelling, shotgun-wielding Groats are the pariahs of Carly Cameron's rural Missouri community, and Carly is understandably horrified when she draws Dustin Groat as a partner for a class project on interviewing. Determined to do well on the assignment and thereby earn the position of sixth-grade newspaper editor, Carly forces herself to swallow her repugnance at Dustin's poor hygiene and antisocial behavior. She is shocked to learn about his deplorable living conditions and history of abuse, but she is even more surprised to discover his gentleness with animals and his passion for music. Partly motivated by guilt over humiliating and belittling him back in second grade, when he was the class bully, Carly urgently tries to "reach" Dustin and save him from his despicable family. Grove's (Crystal Garden) heartfelt story unmasks the vulnerabilities of two preadolescents from very different walks of life. The author is careful to develop Carly as fully as she sketches Dustin's plight. Carly's problems, more universal than Dustin's (she worries about her friendships, her image and identity), will invite readers' sympathy; they anchor the exploration of a frighteningly foreign milieu in the comfortably familiar. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A girl's odyssey through, and ultimate understanding of, the life of a boy whose only crime was being born into the wrong family becomes a powerful tale of redemption from Grove (Rimwalkers, 1993, etc.), written with grace. Almost everyone in the Missouri farming community where sixth-grader Carly lives hates and fears the Groats, who live along a swamp, close to a vile and stinking landfill. The men of the clan are hard-drinking, gun-toting types, painted as caring little for civilized society and its rules. As part of a class assignment, a horrified Carly has to interview Dustin Groat; he's not very clean, fairly surlya loner who comes to school wearing a small pin in his knuckle. In the course of the interview, Carly begins to question her classmates' treatment of Dustin, and to solve some mysteries: why her third-grade teacher, after a run-in with Dustin's father, left town in the middle of the school year, and why Dustin needs a network of hiding places. Worst of all, Carly recalls what she did to Dustin in third grade that so humiliated him that he was forever changed from a boy grieving over his mother's suicide to a ``melted,'' broken creature. Among a cast of memorable characters, Dustin is obviously pitiable but also noble: Small hurts and large ones culminate until there is only an outcast who is not without dignity, and a savior who is not without culpabilityit's all very human, and brimming with compassion. (Fiction. 11-13) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 4^-6. Sixth-grader Carly is horrified when a school assignment requires that she interview her nemesis, Dustin Groat. The class bully comes from an extended family of gun-toting troublemakers, who, it is rumored, operate a methamphetamine lab at the compound they all call home. Accordingly, the once-peaceful skies above the Missouri farm community that is the book's setting are now routinely crowded by flights of black helicopters, which, the Groats claim, represent an intrusive government spying on them. Obviously, this premise is as familiar as the morning headlines, and Carly's subsequent efforts to redeem Dustin are not strikingly original, either. On the other hand, Grove does a convincing job of showing how Carly's close-knit family deals with its conflicted feelings about the Groats and how the experience changes them while also impacting Carly's relationship with her two best friends. Michael Cart

Edition details

• Publisher: Putnam Juvenile
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0399230084
• ISBN 13: 9780399230080
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 199