The Eyes of Kid Midas - Softcover

Neal Shusterman is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty award-winning books for children, teens, and adults, including the Unwind dystology, the Skinjacker trilogy, Downsiders, and Challenger Deep, which won the National Book Award. Scythe, the first book in his newest series, Arc of a Scythe, is a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. He also writes screenplays for motion pictures and television shows. Neal is the father of four, all of whom are talented writers and artists themselves. Visit Neal at StoryMan.com and Facebook.com/NealShusterman.

Grade 6-9-- Short and bespectacled, 13-year-old Kevin is the constant victim of the class bully, Bertram, but things change during a camping trip to a mountain that is supposedly sacred to the Native Americans of the region. After a grueling nighttime climb, Kevin reaches the top at dawn and finds a cool pair of sunglasses, which turn out to be saturated with the mountain's magic. They have the power of turning his desires into reality and making him master of his universe. From making ice-cream cones materialize to filling his house with video games, they grant his every wish, and things predictably get out of hand. Unfortunately, he cannot use the glasses to undo or reverse any of these actions, and when in anger he shouts at Bertram, ``Go to Hell!'' the ground opens up and swallows him. Eventually the fabric of reality starts to unwind and the world as he knows it becomes a thing of the past. Kevin later has a vision of Bertram struggling in chains in his own personally customized hell, in a wonderfully disturbing scene worthy of Stephen King. In general the imagery here is vivid and effective. The ending, in which the boy undoes everything he has done merely by returning the glasses to the mountaintop, may strike some readers as a simplistic cop-out, and the moral conclusion of his dilemma is the obvious one, but the novel features steady action with occasional touches of bizarre, inspired humor and is hypnotically readable. --Lyle Blake Smythers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.