HAZEL BUYS

One of a series of book reviews written for the CLCD, published on their web site:
Children's Literature Comprehensive Database

The Gardener
S.A. Bodeen

The innocent lines from Margaret Wise Brown’s RUNAWAY BUNNY describe a chilling secret worthy of Stephen King. “… I will be a gardener. And I will find you.” His favorite nursery story since childhood, fifteen year old Mason even has a DVD of his long-departed father reciting the story. Mason, cursed with a terrible facial scar from an early injury, is blessed with a football player’s physique. He is a gentle giant, a blend of home-town hero and Scarface.  When Mason plays his DVD for a group of brain-injured teens at a nursing home, he sets off a chain of events as bizarre as they are unexpected. The set-up and transition from life-as-usual into science fiction and mystery is well done and plausible. Thrown into the middle of a strange plot to save humanity from starvation, Mason finds that the sacrifices required are too awful to contemplate. His efforts to find a solution pits the black/white moral code of his youth against the professed altruism of the adults around him: is it better to save one life or many? Blended with questions and concerns about over-population, global warming, wide spread famine, the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of parenthood, this book packs a mother lode of contemporary issues into a fast-paced plot filled with engaging characters and a believable world of space-age botany. It would be good addition to a summer reading list or an extra-credit option in a botany class (which students may suddenly be lining up to take!)

Feiwel & Friends/MacMillan, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-37016-9