Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Release Date: 10/2004
ISBN: 0374306729
Awards:  
Format Reviewed:Hardback
Buy it at Amazon
Read an Excerpt
Genre:   Children's Middle Grade Fiction age 10 and Up
Reviewed: 2004
Reviewer: Allie Bates
Reviewer Notes:  
Copyright MyShelf.com

Beekman's Big Deal
By Michael de Guzman
Illustrated by Nancy Goldenberg

     Author Michael de Guzman spent twenty years as a Hollywood scriptwriter before writing the award winning Melonhead. In the new release, Beekman's Big Deal, de Guzman's second book, Beekman O'Day (a boy whose philosophy in life is to stay in one place as long as he can) and his father (the deal maker) live a transient life. Beakman's deceased mother is a mystery his father will not tell him about, and he has been to so many schools, he cannot remember the order he's gone to them.

      Therefore, now he is starting yet another school, a boy's school, Chance Academy, nicknamed Last Chance Academy, a place for losers, where the principal, the mighty Mr. McCann, grills him, and interviews him and shoves him into Mr. Gno's classroom. When Beekman comes home and discovers that, for the fourteenth time, they're moving, this time to a to a "mews house," he lays down the law for his father: no more moving. For the first time in his life, Beekman will be living in a real house, in Nutting Court. It is time to grow roots.

     Beekman's father is a good father; they have their little stabilizing routines in spite of the instability of their lives. Reluctantly, Beekman (or Beek the Geek as his new classmates "fondly" call him) makes a friend of Marcus Peavy, a boy with an eidetic memory and a twin sister. On the other hand, Searle the bully makes school miserable. The Nutting Court neighbors are all a little crazy but they act like the extended family he never had. Still, between his father and school, Beekman has a whole lot to worry about; and nothing really interests him until he meets Beekman's twin Mary Louise, who seems to spend most of her time in her room behind a locked door, or obsessing over Emily Dickenson. The last possible thing to impress her is Beekman, even when he tries to defend her against Searle, the boy who torments him at school and then stakes out Beekman's would-be girlfriend as his victim at the school dance.

     This is the story of the son of a man who lives for the next big deal that always falls through but who is running away from an inner pain; and a boy who stands imperviously by watching his father's little deals, but finally backed into a corner, makes one of his own. Beekman, a boy finding out who he is by making a stand, will surprisingly move you. Beekman's Big Deal is a story with heart, which packs a surprising emotional punch.