Kids of Appetite
By:
After his father's death, Vic falls in with a mysterious and alluring band of kids that wanders his New Jersey neighborhood.
ISBN: 9780451470782
JLG Release: Nov 2016
Sensitive Areas:
Language: Strong Language
Topics:
Friendship
, Voyages and travels
, Death
, Love
, Facial paralysis
, People with disabilities
, Congolese (Democratic Republic)
, Adolescence
Awards & Honors
Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2016, Young Adult
YALSA 2017 Best Fiction for Young Adults
Indies Choice Book Awards 2017 Book of the Year Finalist, Young Adult
Praise & Reviews
Starred or favorable reviews have been received from these periodicals:
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books*, Booklist, The Horn Book Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly*, School Library Journal, Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA)
Horn Book
In a Hackensack police interrogation room, sixteen-year-old Bruno Victor Benucci
III is being interviewed as a witness to a murder. We learn, via Vic’s first-person
narration including flashbacks, about his rare neurological disorder, Moebius
syndrome, which causes facial paralysis; about his grief over his deceased father;
and about his R In a Hackensack police interrogation room, sixteen-year-old Bruno Victor Benucci
III is being interviewed as a witness to a murder. We learn, via Vic’s first-person
narration including flashbacks, about his rare neurological disorder, Moebius
syndrome, which causes facial paralysis; about his grief over his deceased father;
and about his “heart-thinker” personality, which makes his inability to conventionally
express emotions feel more devastating. In a separate interrogation room
is second narrator Madeline (Mad) Falco, a headstrong, almost-eighteen-year-old
orphan whose abusive uncle was the murder victim. Mad runs with a crew that
includes Congolese-refugee brothers Baz, a fatherly twenty-seven-year-old who
turned himself in for the murder, and twenty-year-old Zuz, who is selectively
mute; and eleven-year-old Coco, a connoisseur of sass, rap, and “faux cussing”
(“What the motherfrakking frak . . . ?”). Early in Vic’s tale, the quartet welcomes
him in with open arms after he runs away from his mother and her despised new
fiancé with his father’s urn, looking to scatter Dad’s ashes per his instructions—a
mission that lends structure to much of his story. Arnold’s (Mosquitoland, rev.
3/15) prose is sharp and observant, his pacing restrained, revealing each character’s
backstory gradually while also setting up a murder investigation that keeps
readers guessing until the second it doesn’t. Vic constantly refers to life revelations
from his father, including the idea of “simultaneous extreme opposites”—a
concept that, given all the laugh-cries to be had in his emotionally well-wrought
novel, Arnold motherfrakking nails. katrina hedeen
Book Details
ISBN
9780451470782
First Release
November 2016
Genre
Fic
Dewey Classification
F
Trim Size
8 1/4" x 5 1/2"
Page Count
352
Accelerated Reader
Level 5.2; Points: 12;
Scholastic Reading Counts
Level 5.6; Points: 19;
Lexile
N/AFormat
Print Book
Edition
Hardcover edition
Publisher
Viking
Potentially Sensitive Areas
Language: Strong Language
Topics
Friendship, Voyages and travels, Death, Love, Facial paralysis, People with disabilities, Congolese (Democratic Republic), Adolescence,
