The broken places : a novel /

Twelve-year-old Paul Tucker is an athletic, well-liked kid leading a fairly idyllic existence. His mother is the high-school teacher everyone has a crush on; his father, Sonny, is a legendary second-generation fireman in their small Pennsylvania town. A burnt building collapses while Sonny tries to rescue Ian, a rebellious teen with a swastika tattoo, but both survive. The rescue makes heroes of Sonny and Ian, with a Hollywood movie in the works, but Sonny descends into a deep and puzzling depression that pulls him further from his family. In unaffected prose sparked with well-chosen detail, Perabo, author of the acclaimed story collection Who I Was Supposed to Be (1999), explores themes of personal failure, fear, social prejudice, and family secrets while telling a gripping coming-of-age story. Best are the tense, heartbreaking scenes between Paul and his father that show the trauma of discovering a parent's deepest weaknesses and how children forgive and accept. --Gillian Engberg

Small-town fame is a blessing at first and then a curse in this modest, carefully composed novel about the 12-year-old descendant of two generations of heroic firemen. Growing up in Casey, Pa., Paul Tucker lives an idyllic life of bike rides, Frisbee golf and Pony football, evading his worrywart mom, Laura, and worshipping his firefighter dad, Sonny. Then one day, Sonny is called to a collapsed house to rescue 16-year-old Ian Finch, a swastika-tattooed rebel who was experimenting with explosives. While Ian's foot is trapped under the wreckage, another wall falls, and Sonny is caught, too. Hours later the two emerge, Ian missing one foot. Besieged by the media, Sonny is soon propelled from local hero to national celebrity. The Tuckers are unsettled by the publicity which culminates in a realistically ludicrous made-for-TV movie but also by Sonny's nervous need for fame. What really happened under the collapsed house, and who was the true hero? As his family deteriorates and his dad begins to fall apart, Paul is hastened toward adulthood by the discovery that love sometimes requires compassion and courage. Perabo was widely praised for Who I Was Supposed to Be, her first collection of stories, and her debut novel is confident and well-crafted. She builds her world out of many carefully chosen details; even the most incidental characters are fully formed, fully present. Her protagonist is such a real boy that he gives credibility to the novel's most sensational events simply by experiencing them, and his thoughtful wonder makes the universal truths of growing up seem new. Agent, Elyse Cheney. 5-city author tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Adult/High School-Every time 12-year-old Paul Tucker hears the fire alarm, he experiences an embarrassing terror. He should be thrilled and ready to follow in the fire-fighting footsteps of his heroic grandfather and father. Instead, he fears that he will fall short of the family ideal, and he worries for his father's safety. His protective mother is little help, and when Sonny performs an incredible rescue, she seems more concerned with the small details of everyday life. The seasoned firefighter seems different, less confident and more hesitant, after the rescue, and, surprisingly, increasingly friendly with the no-good dropout, Ian, whom he has saved. When Sonny and Ian go to Hollywood to work on a TV movie of the rescue, Paul is excited to visit them, but is soon disillusioned when he learns the truth about what actually happened. Visiting the movie set becomes a time of shocking revelations and a test of Paul's love for his family and theirs for him. He grows to accept the unacceptable and, in the process, to accept himself. Teens will be excited and disturbed by the book's action, and the inside view of the Hollywood scene is revealing. Paul's voice is consistently that of a perceptive preadolescent and the other characters are interesting and varied. A quick read that will provide food for thought and possible discussion.-Susan H. Woodcock, Chantilly Regional Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A lukewarm first novel from Perabo (stories: Who I Was Supposed to Be, 1999) that tries to capture and criticize small-town America, in a plot-heavy story of a firefighter vaulted into fame by catastrophe. Pennsylvania's version of the Columbine scoundrels have made a mess: a small explosive device has leveled the home of one of the relatives of swastika-tattooed roustabout Ian Finch, who becomes trapped in the rubble. The rescue effort tests the mettle of Casey's fire-department captain, Sonny Tucker, a fireman's fireman whose idyllic life includes his son (the protagonist), 12-year-old Paul, who watches first as his father becomes trapped under the house with Finch, then as both emerge with the chilling tale that Sonny chopped off Finch's foot to save him. Paul learns of courage and manhood as his father becomes a hero and the TV people arrive to turn it all into a miniseries. But the plot doesn't quite get it: though Perabo's prose is mostly bland and colorless, a disembodied intelligence descends occasionally to provide lyric insight. It's as much out of place as it is refreshing. And this is how we are told that the fictional media's version of the rescue is "both familiar and affirming in days when so little else is, constructed from the very myths we most long to believe." All well and good-but then it turns out that Sonny isn't himself anymore. His new fascination with the Finch boy, who is otherwise universally disliked, becomes the tension fulcrum, and the mystery of what really happened under the house keeps the story moving. Problem is, Perabo's message never transcends itself. She wants to challenge the stereotypes created by the media, but she simply replaces them with other stereotypes: Finch turns out to be more than a Nazi thug; he's the standard-issue misunderstood rebel. A villainless media-bashing feel-gooder that reads like a pitch to Ron Howard, who unfortunately already did firemen. Author tour