The Cloud Chamber - Hardcover

Maynard, Joyce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068987152X ISBN 13: 9780689871528

Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2005

Synopsis

When his father shoots himself and ends up blind, Nate Chance s world is thrown into a tailspin as the members of his family retreat from reality, but not wanting to become the tragedy s next victim, Nate sets his sights on winning the science fair by building the cloud chamber that he and his father had planned to do before everything went wrong.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Maynard started her writing career when she was fourteen. Her books include the memoirs At Home in the World and Looking Back and the novels To Die For (which was made into a movie starring Nicole Kidman) and, most recently, The Usual Rules (an ALA Best Book for Young Adults). The mother of three grown children, she lives in northern California. Visit her Web site at www.joycemaynard.com.

Reviews

Grade 7-10-In the 1960s, Nate, 14, copes with a family tragedy that is poorly handled by most of the adults in his life. Apparently, his father attempted suicide, but failure to find the rifle that caused his head wound has the local law enforcement-and the neighbors-wondering if Nate's mother fired the shot. Their Montana dairy farm was already in big trouble and now bankruptcy is imminent. Nate deals with the cold shoulders he gets at school by determining to build a science project that would make his father proud: a cloud chamber in which the radiation of cosmic particles is made visible in vapor. His partner is the girl no one likes: Naomi dresses funny, and her father is a fire-and-brimstone preacher. But she is a good artist and has plenty of emotional intelligence, and Nate learns to treat her as an equal on the project and as a friend as well. Junie, six, has become his charge now that the family is collapsing. He listens to his sister, comforts her, and allows himself to be cheered by her seemingly endless good will. These are real kids. The plot moves quickly and engagingly through Nate's trials and small triumphs. Only the ending seems awkward and underdeveloped as he takes the car to drive Junie to see their father, now living in a mental hospital, learning Braille, and planning to go to college. That's too much too fast, but the rest of the story rings solid and true.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Gr. 6-9. Maynard, whose previous books have been for adults, has mixed success in her first effort for youth, which combines stock elements of middle-grade fiction (science fair aspirations, a school outcast who becomes a friend) with a probing of small-town family upheaval more akin to hard-hitting adult novels such as Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) than to most children's fiction.In the first chapter, eighth-grader Nate watches his bleeding father, a failed Montana farmer, stagger across the yard after a botched suicide attempt. Tinkering with a science project (a radiation-detecting cloud chamber) alongside school pariah, Naomi, becomes Nate's bulwark against the pain of his hospitalized father's absence, an incommunicative mother, and a prissy 1950s community that closes ranks against the family. Nate's earnestness and -naivete seem to target a younger audience than the story's tragedy and difficult issues would suggest, a juxtaposition that may prevent the book from finding a broad audience. But a bedrock of emotional authenticity underlies Maynard's storytelling, and the prairie landscape, the "vast open space of nothing but sky overhead," makes a stark, unforgettable impression. Try this with mature middle-school and junior-high readers. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068987152X
• ISBN 13: 9780689871528
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288