Jack says, “As she heads back to the grand stands, I realize that, even wearing fancy high heels in the rutted dirt, Elizabeth still struts better than a world-class sprinter.”īefore Jack can race he has to make his wiry body even lighter and drop ten pounds in two days, down to 106. Later an accident promotes Jack to bug boy, or apprentice jockey, and a beautiful and wealthy girl takes an interest in him. When Jack declines, the man roughs him up, and keeps coming around the stables. In the beginning of the book a shady character offers Jack a small fortune if he will hide a sponge up a nostril of a favorite horse, throwing an important race. Luper does a good job contrasting the wealth of the “fat cats” who come to Saratoga to bet on the horses and the staff behind the scenes. By saving everything he earns and sleeping in a stall he can send money home to his destitute family. The scrawny fifteen year old cleans out stables and keeps the racehorses in shape. Jack Walsh is an exercise boy on the track. It’s cleverly constructed so the reader knows more than the characters do and the suspense builds to a suitably dramatic climax.īug Boy doesn’t have the smooth prose of The Uninvited but its chock full of details about horse racing in Depression era Saratoga Springs. Chapters in The Uninvited alternate between the voices of three young people, Mimi, Jay and Cramer, a hardworking local. The Uninvited ticks right along in snappy prose as a mysterious stalker at the bucolic farmhouse breaks in to steal and leave strange messages. Did the Canadian border guards mysteriously strip you of your chutzpah once you crossed over? was afraid, suddenly, that she might cry again. The house only gets dial-up internet and people commute in canoes. Mimi, a brash city girl, flounders in a rural world she never knew existed. When she finds the old house that her father owns, a place that is supposed to be empty, it is occupied by Jay, a young musician. On the back roads of Ontario her mini-cooper is chased by a dog and she swerves to avoid two farmers talking through the windows of their trucks. Tim Wynne-Jones begins his novel, The Uninvited, with wild Mimi Shapiro, a college freshman from New York City, driving north to escape a romance gone sour. Betsy Kepes reviews these new books for teen readers.
Eric Luper uses the Saratoga Springs race course as the center of his novel, "Bug Boy". Canadian writer Tim Wynne-Jones sets his latest book, "The Uninvited", in rural Ontario, somewhere east of Ottawa. Regional books include more than histories and trail guides.
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