SMILES TO GO -- Jerry Spinelli

Joanna Cotler Books -- hc
New York -- ©2008 -- 248pp
ISBN: 978-0-06-028133-5

A high school freshman and science geek struggles with all the normal trials for his age (mainly, girls [one in particular] and friends who are more popular) but everything is more complicated when he learns that nothing ... NOTHING ... lasts forever.

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Jerry Spinelli has an uncanny knack for capturing me in his books.

Okay, perhaps that's a bit extreme, and certainly quite self-indulgent, but the truth is, I recognized traits in the main character that I most certainly displayed when I was that age. Chances are that boys that age today recognize themselves too.

I was able to read this book in one sitting. Not because it was an easy read (it wasn't too difficult, though), but because it held my interest ... I wanted to keep reading. I wanted to see what happened next. It's definitely well written and it would be easy for a reader to get caught up in it.

But even with that ringing endorsement, I can't quite give it five stars.

I don't mind leaving a book with questions unanswered. But I don't like getting to the end of a book to discover that the direction the author was going in is suddenly changed. Deviating from the path is okay, but changing the rules of a game is not. The ending comes quite suddenly, with a curveball at the reader so severe that we couldn't possibly see it coming -- and it changes what the book is about.

This boys' exploration of love, death, friendship, eternity, and the discovery that what he thought he knew to be true, wasn't, suddenly becomes a book about family. It turns the outside, inside, and really, what we spent 150 pages reading, doesn't matter anymore. But it should. Even a new discovery about something personal, something famil-iar, should still have it's connections with what's gone before.

Yes, there are hints at this throughout. I realize that. But the hints aren't strong enough to be taken seriously, and at least one part of the discovery, which is rather important, is TOLD to us, by another character (I'm trying very hard not to create spoilers) -- there is no way that our character, or we, could have discovered it without being directly informed. It's kind of a cheap way out (and the drama of the near-ending is a bit over-done), and for that, I take away one star. ...a four-star book.