In another eloquently written, heartrending novel, Hartnett (<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Thursday's Child; <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">What the Birds See) plunges readers into the story of a young man facing the end of his tormented life. Through flashbacks and shifts in narrative voice, 20-year-old Anwell's recollections of the events that have brought him to this point slowly and painfully come to light. As a child, his distant and careless parents gave him the responsibility of looking after Vernon, his mentally disabled brother, and a terrible mistake in judgment results in Vernon's death. Anwell, now referring to himself as Gabriel, is paralyzed by grief and imagines his mother, in particular, is "making an island" of him. His only friends are a feral child named Finnegan with whom he makes a Faustian pact, and his dog, Surrender. As Finnegan begins to menace the town with arson, Gabriel must stand by and watch until he realizes he has in fact surrendered his soul. The pace of the novel is almost excruciatingly measured until the heart-stopping conclusion that, in retrospect, is manifest throughout the tale, attesting to the quality of the storytelling. Readers are left to grieve for an angel child, compassionately portrayed, engaged in a tug-of-war with evil and despair. Hartnett's novels may never reach the widest audience of young readers, but those who find her work will be moved by her gifted writing and the powerful changes her characters undergo. Ages 14-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Mar.)

In the small, desolate town of Mulyan, a well-behaved young boy plays with a toy car atop the fence rail surrounding his front yard. A very different sort of boy--sunbaked, unkempt, and vaguely dangerous--appears on the street side of the fence to scratch his name in the wood and taunt the young boy to move beyond his boundaries. So begins the eerie relationship between Gabriel and Finnegan: the first, an isolated and disturbed child in a profoundly dysfunctional family with an ugly history; the second, a cruel and destructive yet wildly freeing force. The two determine to be each other's reflection: one all good, the other all bad. Together they share dark secrets, make plans, and experience a pure love for Surrender, Gabriel's adopted hound. Told retrospectively from the deathbed of 20-year-old Gabriel, this is a potent and disquieting psychological tale. Given its complex vocabulary, troubling characters, and grim content, this is a book for older teens willing to experience some of humanity's bleaker aspects.

Growing up in a claustrophobic country town and emotionally imprisoned by abusive parents, Gabriel, twenty, has only two friends: his dog, Surrender, and volatile Finnigan. When Gabriel befriends Evangeline and learns the extent of Finnigan's violent nature, he realizes he must stop him once and for all. By oscillating time and quietly stoking the pace, Hartnett leads readers to an explosive conclusion.

A literary psychological thriller, hauntingly told, of a lonely, ostracized boy who "since childhood had been building a wall meant to protect [him] from the worst of the harm." Anwell, renamed Gabriel, "the messenger, the teller of astonishing truths," is 20 years old and dying of an unnamed illness. Through flashbacks, and from alternating perspectives, Hartnett's grim, beautifully written tale of adolescent yearnings gone awry gradually unfolds. Isolated in a home with punitive, repressive parents, trapped in a country town that "has as many eyes as a fly," where he can never live down a fatal mistake he made when he was seven, Gabriel makes a secret, binding boyhood pact with Finnigan, an unpredictable gypsy-child, in which he surrenders his right to do wrong, and after which unsolved violent incidents occur. The reader is caught by the many layers of mystery, and by the resilient lyricism, the powerful imagery. The clues piece together masterfully, as what was set up as a complex friendship between two boys and their beloved dog evolves into a chilling story of love, guilt, revenge and sorrow. Sophisticated young readers will be awed by the delicate, measured, heartbreaking portrait that emerges. (Fiction. YA)

Gr 9 Up-When Anwell was seven, he caused the death of his developmentally disabled older brother. Several years later, he meets a boy his age, a wild child named Finnigan, and the two forge an unorthodox yet formidable bond. As this psychological thriller gracefully unfolds, Anwell-who now calls himself Gabriel, in reference to the archangel-and Finnigan take turns narrating an array of possible facts, probable lies, and half-truths. That Anwell/Gabriel's parents are cold and repressive is probably true. That Finnigan ever intended to keep his promise to be Gabriel's friend is patently false. Through the years of the boys' adolescence, their small Australian town is plagued by arson. Anwell's father gathers a vigilante troop to ward away the firebug while his son curries favor with the local cop by telling him when and where the vigilantes are headed. The boys share a hound named Surrender; he is a thief and marauder, not unlike at least one of his owners. As this stew of unhappiness, mischief, and outright criminality unwinds-apparently while young Gabriel lies on his deathbed-readers come to realize that he is schizophrenic. Whether his avenging efforts truly come to murder, in the form of patricide, isn't crystal clear. But it doesn't need to be: the plot is relentless, just as Finnigan's efforts to torture Gabriel and Gabriel's efforts to quell Finnigan appear to be in the end.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

From the gripping cover showing a raging inferno to the blood-chilling revelation of the final chapter, this page-turner is a blistering yet dense psychological thriller. The similarities with Pete Hautman's Invisible (Simon & Schuster, 2005/VOYA August 2005) are eerie: outsider young men with mysterious friends; a fascination with fire; strained, past-the-breaking-point relationships with parents; shadowy hints of past tragedy; and romantic humiliation sparking the final conflagration of violence. Set in a nowhere town in Australia, this story of Gabriel portrays a young man recovering from an unstated illness under the care of his aunt. Gabriel's chapters alternate with those of his friend Finnigan, a wild child of the countryside. Gabriel recalls meeting Finnigan, their adventures with Gabriel's dog, Surrender, and his confrontations with his parents. He remembers his mentally handicapped brother, Vernon, whom Gabriel killed by locking him in an unused refrigerator. This act is both the horror of his history and the harbinger for the violence to come. It is a dark ride into the territory that only authors like Robert Cormier once dared to enter. Winner of the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction (presented by State Library of Victoria, Australia), the book echoes in some way another Australian award winner, Martin Zusak's brilliant I Am the Messenger (Knopf, 2005/VOYA February 2005) with its beautiful, often oblique, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding deeply layered prose that will attract readers who enjoy a challenge like moths to a flame.-Patrick Jones.