A Piece of the Sky

I'm giving this book 5 stars based on my son's inability to put it down until he finished it, not from my own first hand reading. We've struggled to find books that engage my very reading-capable 8 year old's sense of imagination, and it seems we've hit upon something with this author. Our son reads 2 grade levels above his age, but it's been difficult to get him turned on to much more than reading picture books to his younger siblings. I was worried about the suspensful story line, but he had no nightmares or fears of any kind, though he's not generally afraid of things like the dark either. We'll be buying the rest of David Patneaude's books and look forward to many more hours of our son eagerly reading!

A Piece of the Sky. It comes in a bright, dust-jacket free edition, with a picture on the cover, reminiscent of the Hardy Boys books. And maybe it was because of the cover, maybe not, but I felt that it carried echoes of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries. It's an adventure story, with much of the action taking place during a multi-day hike through the woods. A Piece of the Sky is told in alternating narratives, 150 years apart, as two different boys each search for a hidden meteorite in the Oregon hills. Most of the story takes place in the present, when fourteen-year-old Russell travels to the small town of Port Orford for the summer. Russell and his mother are cleaning out his grandfather's home, because of his grandfather's fading memory. Russell longs to connect with his grandfather, and to bring back the older man's personality. (This dynamic reminded me of Jumping the Scratch, by Sarah Weeks, though the two books are very different from one another). Russell is looking for a way to "open the lock on Grandpa's world". Thrown in a scrap of meteorite, handed down in the family through several generations, a mysterious old man named Legs, just out of prison for manslaughter, and a bad guy named Full Moon Mullins, and you have all of the ingredients for a non-stop adventure. Russell, and his two friends, Phoebe and Isaac, end up hiking deep into the hills in search of the meteorite, and facing serious danger along the way. This story has an old-fashioned feel to it. There are modern references (Phoebe's ear buds, Isaac's time fighting in Iraq), but you get the feeling that these references could be changed to others from 20 or 30 years ago, and the rest of the story wouldn't need to change much. I don't think that's literally true. There's a nurse (Phoebe and Isaac's mom) who takes care of Russell's grandfather and Legs in her home. Russell and Phoebe are runners, rather than the bicycle riders that they might have been in an earlier tale. And Isaac's shell-shock and war injury are not glossed over. The old-fashioned thing is more of a feeling - a tone - that the book carries. Personally, I really enjoyed it. I felt like a kid again, reading under the covers with a flashlight, because I had to know how the story ended. I'm pretty sure that I dreamed about Russell, Phoebe, and Isaac hiking through those woods, too. It's clear that the author has actually hiked in an area much like the one described. While the characterization in this book isn't deep (I had a hard time getting a fix on Phoebe, in particular), the craftsmanship and pacing are excellent. The author demonstrates a flair for spare description that gets things across, without excessive detail. For example, here is Russell's impression of his mother: "She'd gotten thin enough in the past month to pass for a high school kid, except for the dark shadows around her eyes. She was on the worrying-about-your-dad diet, the one where you spend all day not eating much and trying to