Rush
Jonathan Friesen
There are two things that make Jake King feel alive: his next-door neighbor Salome and the dangerous stunts he pulls to get an adrenaline rush. He’s managed to get kicked out of high school because of one of his stunts and now his father (who owns the mill in the small California town) has pulled some strings to get him a place on the team of firefighters who rappel from helicopters in the midst of forest fires. It’s the best rush of all, but Jake soon realizes that the leader of the group, Mox, is dangerous. Mox has created a secret club called the Immortals and in order to be a member you must pass an initiation rite, stunts that can easily get you killed, and that has killed many of the young firefighters who have attempted the rite before Jake.
I’m not real sure what to say about this one. I picked it up because I always need more “boy books” in my booktalking repertoire and this certainly qualified. I found it jumpy in places – Friesen doesn’t always explain things as well as I would like. I cannot help but wonder if that’s because it is a book geared towards guys and I’m fonder of the descriptive style used more commonly with girl books. I’d like to hand this one to some of my 8th graders and see if they found the beginning as confusing as I did and if they liked Friesen’s writing style.
The copy of Rush that I used from this review came from my school library.
1 comment:
I'll have to take a look at this one. My boy books for the week have been the very gory Paul Zindel monster books. Try dusting those off for your boys.
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