Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

<i>Cricket Man</i> (review)

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bcc.0.0331

1558-6766

Deborah Stevenson,

American and British Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: Cricket Man Deborah Stevenson Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds; Cricket Man. Seo/Atheneum, 2008; [208p] ISBN 978-1-4169-4981-7 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6–9 Kenny may seem to be an ordinary middle-schooler, but when he’s cleaning the family pool every morning, he’s the unexpected savior to the hordes of crickets and other animals that blunder into the water overnight and can’t get themselves out. He’s so struck by this view of himself that he even makes himself up a t-shirt sporting a “CM,” for “Cricket Man,” and his home-drawn logo. Even more than the crickets, however, he’d like to save Jodie, a high-school girl living nearby, who has been sad and lonely ever since her breakup with her boyfriend; as he and Jodie fall into a pattern of occasional friendship, he becomes more involved, more concerned, and more helpless. Naylor deftly creates a full character in Kenny while leaving the major drama to other characters; though he’s a regular kid with a taste for skateboarding and a resistance to the tedious planning for his older sister’s wedding, he’s also a thinker and a keen observer, whose assessments of middle-school kid culture (“None of us ever says much when we’re in a car with a parent. It’s like anything we say is being recorded and transmitted to the other parents”) will ring true to readers. The notion of his imagined self operating as a model for his real self will also have resonance for those kids who have been inspired to improvements by characters and superheroes, even as it’s clear that Cricket Man merely allows Kenny free rein to be who he already is. It’s easy to see why he’d be the kid Jodie would be able to lean on, and readers will applaud his ability to do the right thing in the face of grownup authority and middle-school angst. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois