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