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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2014, 288 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2015, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Norah Piehl
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Destiny takes a detour in this heartbreakingly hilarious novel from the acclaimed author of Winger, which Kirkus Reviews called "smart" and "wickedly funny."
Finn Easton sees the world through miles instead of minutes. It's how he makes sense of the world, and how he tries to convince himself that he's a real boy and not just a character in his father's bestselling cult-classic book. Finn has two things going for him: his best friend, the possibly-insane-but-definitely-excellent Cade Hernandez, and Julia Bishop, the first girl he's ever loved.
Then Julia moves away, and Finn is heartbroken. Feeling restless and trapped in the book, Finn embarks on a road trip with Cade to visit their college of choice in Oklahoma. When an unexpected accident happens and the boys become unlikely heroes, they take an eye-opening detour away from everything they thought they had planned—and learn how to write their own destiny.
Part 1
Perigee Moon
The Quit Mission
Look: I do not know where I actually came from. I wonder, I suspect, but I do not know.
I am not the only one who sometimes thinks I came from the pages of a book my father wrote. Maybe it's like that for all boys of a certain—or uncertain—age: We feel as though there are no choices we'd made through all those miles and miles behind us that hadn't been scripted by our fathers, and that our futures are only a matter of flipping the next page that was written ahead of us.
I am not the only one who's ever been trapped inside a book.
A story involving alien visitors from outer space, an epileptic kid who doesn't really know where he came from, knackeries and dead horses falling a hundred sideways miles, abandoned prisons, a shadow play, moons and stars, and jumping from a bridge into a flood should probably begin with a big explosion in the sky about fourteen billion years ago. After all, the whole story is ...
100 Sideways Miles, with its quirky mix of past and present, physics and history, will remind some readers of Louis Sachar's Holes - except with a lot raunchier language. In previous novels like Winger and Grasshopper Jungle, Andrew Smith has demonstrated - often to hilarious effect - that he totally gets the mind of the adolescent male. Here, as in his previous books, he also shows that for teenage guys, vulnerability and bravado go hand-in-hand, that friendships and father-son relationships don't have to be treacly to be real and vital, and that buying condoms may, in fact, be simultaneously the most embarrassing and hilarious rite of passage that a young man ever has to undertake.....continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
"Self-taught civil engineers are probably as trustworthy as self-taught brain surgeons and self-taught airline pilots," thinks Finn to himself in 100 Sideways Miles. He's thinking about William Mulholland, the engineer better known today as the namesake for Mulholland Drive, home to many famous actors and musicians and the inspiration for the movie of the same name by David Lynch, who once said the road carried "the history of Hollywood."
The road was opened in 1924, but the real-life incident that consumes much of Finn's attention, and that ultimately led to the end of Mulholland's career, happened in 1928. Mulholland was born in Ireland in 1855 and moved to Los Angeles in 1877. There he took odd jobs digging wells, prospecting for ...
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