Starred Review The 61-word run-on sentence on the first page sets the stream-of-consciousness tone, and then two pages later there's hand jobs and meth p, it's a Rapp novel, all right. And the quality hits the high standards of 33 Snowfish (2003) and Under the Wolf, Under the Dog (2004). Fourteen-year-old Jamie (aka "Punkzilla") has gone AWOL from his military school, is off his meds, and is making his way from Oregon to Memphis, where his older brother, Peter, is dying of cancer. Though he is thankful to leave behind his career as an iPod thief, life on the road doesn't seem much better: his fellow Greyhound riders are frightening, he gets jumped in a roadside restroom, and his androgynous features land him in increasingly disturbing situations. You expect such bleakness from Rapp, but it's the flashes of humor and optimism that exhilarate. Beneath a surface of disease, despair, and disfigurements, Rapp's road trip is populated with good souls who, despite their circumstances, make significant sacrifices to help Punkzilla. Rapp constructs the book as a series of unsent letters to Peter and punctuates them with correspondence, some old enough to be heartbreakingly out of date, that Punkzilla has received from friends and family. This is devastating stuff, but breathtaking, too.

Traveling to visit his brother who's dying of cancer, fourteen-year-old Jamie writes letters. These are interspersed with earlier missives written to Jamie, and gradually his troubled history emerges: time on the streets, punctuated by drugs, sex, and crime. With his quirky idiomatic expressions, striking word choices, and stream-of-consciousness prose, nobody writes about disposable, marginalized youth quite like Adam Rapp.

Rapp mines his Midwestern roots for another well-realized tale of raw teenage woe. Fourteen-year-old Jamie (aka "Punkzilla" due to his love of the music) has gone AWOL from military school and is living in a halfway house in Portland, Ore., when he gets the news that his eldest brother Peter, a gay playwright, is dying of cancer in Memphis. Desperate to see P before he dies, Jamie embarks on a cross-country journey that reads like a contemporary version of On the Road . Along the way, he encounters myriad societal dropouts, many of whom function as his bargain-bin guardian angels. Narrated in an out-of-order, epistolary manner, the tale contains the author's familiar themes of isolation, societal rejection and the invisibility of the rural poor. But his cast of disenfranchised characters is so authentically rendered (dim Bucktooth Jenny talks to her collection of doll heads, kindly transsexual Lewis cooks Jamie a hotplate meal) that fans of his gritty YA fare will be more than happy to be in his company again. (Fiction. 14 & up)

At 14, pot-smoking, DVD player-stealing Jamie is no angel (though his androgynous good looks get him plenty of attention). He is sent to military school, but soon goes AWOL, spending some rough months in Portland, Ore. (mugging joggers, trying meth), before heading to Memphis by Greyhound bus to visit his gay older brother, Peter, who is dying of cancer. Rapp (<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Under the Wolf, Under the Dog) tells the story through Jamie's unsent letters, with additional letters from relatives and friends giving more background and context. Jamie, who has ADD, details every step (being taken advantage of sexually, getting jumped, befriending a female-to-male transsexual, losing his virginity) in expletive-filled, stream-of-consciousness narration with insights into seedy roadside America (“I think that as a general rule lonely people give other lonely people money a lot”) and his own situation. Whether Jamie will survive his bad luck and make it to Memphis in time gives the story tension, but while Jamie leaves much behind each day on the road, little is found. The teenager's singular voice and observations make for an immersive reading experience. Ages 14–up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(May)

Gr 9 Up-Fourteen-year-old Jamiestreet name Punkzillais AWOL from military school. Hes already lived hand to mouth in a west coast city, stealing iPods, doing cheap drugs, and getting the occasional joyless hand job. Now he is headed to Memphis where his oldest brother, Peter, a gay playwright, is dying from cancer. His story is told through his letters to Peter as he hitchhikes across the country, written in the backseats of cars, under a tree where a man hanged himself, and ultimately in retrospect when he reaches his journeys sad end. Along the way he meets the good, the bad, and the skewed, including a girl who gives him his first experience of loving intercourse. Like his brother, punk boy Jamie will never fulfill the expectations of his rigidly conservative father or meet the needs of his ineffectual mother. As in 33 Snowfish (Candlewick, 2003), Rapp pulls no punches in depicting the degrading life of children on the streets. The choice to live free from parents and school comes at a costto survive Jamie becomes both exploited and exploiter. But there is more here than the sordid streets. Impulsive and naive as he may be, Jamie is struggling for something that just might come close to integrity. Readers can see the good in him and even in his infuriating parents. In the end he finds shelter with his brothers lover, who opens the door to the creative life, a more intelligent and focused world-outside-the-box where Jamie just might find what he needs. Exquisitely true in its raw but vulnerable voice, this story is a compulsive read. Carolyn Lehman, Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA

Fourteen-year-old Jamie, known as ôPunkzilla,ö journeys across the country hoping to get to Tennessee before Peter, his older brother, dies from cancer. Told entirely through brutally honest (and curse-word filled) letters that Jamie writes as he travels, his story reveals what it has been like since he ran away from military school. Jamie tells of his life in Portland, where he lived in a low-income community populated by bizarre characters. He writes to his brother about his drug use, his sexual encounters, and his ôjobö robbing runners. Although Jamie is no fan of traditional punctuation, he has a real way with words and embellishes his already engaging and strange tales with unusual imagery. As he travels to Tennessee, Jamie meets odd, interesting, and dangerous people. Willing to do almost anything for a free ride, place to sleep, or meal, Jamie often finds himself in bad situations, but he never dwells too long on anything, determined to get to his brother no matter what it takes. It is sometimes difficult to remember that Jamie is only fourteen. He is a heartbreaking mess, and the addition of letters from his family members and friends help to fill in JamieÆs complicated history. Although he is self-reliant and keeps up this tough street-punk attitude, it is easy to see how Jamie is just a kid who made some bad choices and fell in with some unsavory people. JamieÆs frenetic writing style adds to the already tense, gritty plot, making it difficult to set the novel down.ùAmanda MacGregor.