11 March 2010 AS EASY AS FALLING OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH by Lynne Rae Perkins, Greenwillow, May 2010, 352p., ISBN: 978-0-06-187090-3; Libr. ISBN: 978-0-06-187091-0

"In the summertime when the weather is highYou can stretch right up and touch the sky"-- Ray Dorset/Mungo Jerry, 1970

"Now he looked at his watch again.  Time was so weird.  Exactly and only one hour had passed since he had opened that letter."He had received the letter, with the yellow new-address forwarding sticker and 'Urgent--important information' stamped on the envelope in red ink, several days ago.  But it was like Peter and the Wolf, no, wait-- it was like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf.'  The letters with 'Urgent--important information' stamped in red had been arriving regularly from the camp director, and at first Ry would tear them open immediately.  Inside, there would be a photocopied note reminding him to bring Gold Bond powder to prevent chafing, or to wear his boots for an hour every day to break them in, to study up on this or that epoch, or that the itinerary had been altered slightly due to unforeseen circumstances but don't worry, it would still be great."The last one he had opened before this one had been kind of weird, he remembered that now, but to tell the truth, he hadn't read it that carefully.  There was so much going on: the moving truck bringing the furniture, his grandfather arriving, his parents leaving for their trip.  He tried to remember now what it had said.  Because this one said only--he took it out of his pocket to read it one more time:

"Dear Roy,Do not come to camp.  There is no camp.  Camp is a concept that no longer exists in a real place or time.We are so sorry.  The Summer ArchaeoTrails Program will not take place.  A statistically improbable number of things have gone wrong and the camel's back is broken.  Your money will be fully refunded as soon as I sell my car and remortgage my house..."

By time the story begins and Ry is once again reading the letter, a statistically improbable number of things have already begun to go wrong for him, too.  The train transporting him from the Midwest to the now-nonexistent summer camp in Montana had been delayed in the middle of nowhere.  When he accidentally found this last letter stuffed in his backpack, read it, and tried to immediately call his grandfather from the train, there were no bars of reception on his cell phone.  Hearing that the train delay was going to be at least forty minutes, he'd stepped off the train and climbed a nearby hill to try and get some reception.  Now, inexplicably, the train has suddenly departed -- with all his stuff -- before he can get back down the hill to it.  His phone is already very low on power and even if the charger were not on the train, there is absolutely no sight of civilization -- other than silent train tracks -- from where he is sitting.

This would still not be that much of a problem (or a story) had his family not just moved to a new town where he knows nobody.  This would still not be that much of a problem (or a story) had his grandfather -- who came to their new house to dog-sit and who is, just about at this moment, suffering a memory-scrambling concussion -- been available to answer the phone.  This would still not be that much of a problem (or a story) had his parents -- who have headed down to the Caribbean to revitalize their marriage -- not had their cell phone stolen by a monkey.   

Holy smokes!  How many more things can go wrong from this point forward?  Damned near 350 pages worth.  But this is middle school literature -- as opposed to gritty YA -- so the only rotting corpses that result from the endlessly unfolding and jaw-dropping mountain of falls, crashes, explosions, missteps, crossed or broken wires and opportunities just-missed-by-a-hair, are those of mollusks and rodents.  

"'Do they have an itinerary?' asked Arvin.  'Or are they just blowing in the wind, wherever love takes them, skipping over the ocean like a stone?'"'Arvin's kind of a mystic,' explained Beth."

AS EASY AS FALLING OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH by Newbery medalist Lynne Rae Perkins is a splashing, crashing, smashing ode to one young man's summer vacation gone terribly (and wonderfully) awry.       

Richie Partington, MLIS

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