Fourmile
With intense bonding and angry, sometimes violent face-offs, this fast, spare novel will appeal to Gary Paulsen fans, especially boys. On their farm in southern Alabama, Foster, 12, is scared of Dax, his widowed mother’s boyfriend, who bullies Foster and even hurts his beloved dog, Joe. Then a stranger, Gary, comes by, and he helps Foster fix up the farm to prepare it for sale. But what is Gary’s secret? What is he running from and why? At the core of the drama is the hard daily work as Gary helps Foster paint the fence and fix up the house. With Dax always an ugly threat, Gary teaches Foster to drive and to shoot a pistol (Gary had a lot of practice as a soldier in Iraq). The plain, present-tense prose in Foster’s first-person narrative—much of it in dialogue—about the rural landscape and daily work on the farm will hold readers as much as the climactic deadly action. Grades 5-6. --Hazel Rochman