Review: Reacher at 13, already a force of nature
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 15, 2011
"Second Son" offers Lee Child fans a whole new version of their hulking hero by following Jack Reacher around for a day or two in August 1974 when the big tough guy was still a kid, a 13-year-old military brat who had just moved with his dad, mom and older brother Joe to a Marine Base on Okinawa.The Kindle Short is also a morsel to chew on while waiting for the Sept 27 release of "The Affair," the 15th novel in the Reacher series.Reacher as a teenager already had the trappings of the swaggering presence he would grow into later on. It was clear even then that Reacher was going "to be unstoppable. A force of nature."At thirteen, the kid looks "like an engineer's napkin sketch for something even bigger and even more ambitious, his huge bony frame like the scaffolding around a major construction project. Six more inches and a final eighty bounds of beef would finish the job."Even though this is a story about kids, it's no Hardy Boys adventure. Reacher ends up decking the neighborhood bully, a smelly kid made out of blubber sprouting a honking big reddish boil on the left side of his neck who deserves every bruised and broken rib that Reacher manages to deliver. Reacher, who even then was known by friend and family by his last name only, takes the first swing by landing a left directly on the boil.There's a school entrance exam for the Reacher brothers to pass and someone has stolen the binder containing the answers. The suspicion falls on Joe. There's also a lost code book with classified information that Reacher's dad had responsibility for keeping safe and secure. Readers will expect that everything will get worked out somehow and that in the getting there the action will be turbocharged.Even though this is a short story, Child uses the same breathless style that he does in the other Reacher books. He piles sentences one on top of another in a linear fashion that doesn't give the reader much time to pause and take a breath.He likes to take a word or idea from one sentence and build a chain of thought or image by repeating the word or thought in the next sentence: "They walked on. Forty different places. Forty  different welcomes to forty different neighborhoods. Except that the welcomes had been different."Child's style is also kinetic. Reacher is almost always in motion. The action follows Reacher when he moves, and whether it's from one room to another or from one location to another, you're moving too. It's cinematic. Short scenes with quick cuts. It's the reason his books are as faced paced as anyone's.Reacher at 13 is a already practiced smartass who talks like an adult and is as fast with a quip as he is with his ham-sized fists. He's already better at deduction than a logician. He's a tough kid but he's tender enough to still listen to his mom. There's nothing vulnerable about our superhero and there's nothing that would in any way seriously disappoint any of the legion of Reacher fans. Take a deep breath and dive in.