Dead End in Norvelt
by Jack Gantos
Summary
Jack Gantos casts a fictionalized version of himself as a boy grounded for an entire summer in 1962 after he fires his father's souvenir Japanese sniper rifle at a drive in movie screen, one of several disasters, alongside chronic nosebleeds so severe they douse his shirt in blood, that keep interrupting an otherwise ordinary Pennsylvania childhood. His only permitted outing is to help an elderly neighbor, Miss Volker, who writes the town's obituaries and, since she can no longer use her arthritic hands, dictates them to Jack while he types. As Norvelt's original Depression era residents start dying in a rapid, suspicious cluster, Jack's obituary writing turns him into an accidental investigator, and the mystery eventually traces back to Mr. Spizz, a local eccentric who has poisoned several old women with chocolates laced with the rodent poison 1080 out of a warped hope of finally winning Miss Volker's affection once her old friends are gone. The book closes with the mystery solved, Miss Volker safe, and Jack, his summer of punishment finally over, taking to the air in his father's small plane to drop paint filled balloons on the drive in theater where his summer of trouble began, a last piece of mischief that reads as a kind of freedom rather than another disaster.
Gantos writes in a loose, comic, deliberately exaggerated voice, and the book moves fast between broad slapstick, real historical detail about the town's founding, and surprisingly blunt violence for a book aimed at its age group. It suits readers who like their history delivered with jokes rather than reverence, and the murders sit oddly close to the comedy throughout, an uneasy mix some readers find bracing and others find tonally jarring.
Historical Context & Significance
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Dead End in Norvelt on September 13, 2011, and it won the 2012 Newbery Medal as well as the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. That year's two Newbery Honor books were Thanhha Lai's Inside Out and Back Again and Eugene Yelchin's Breaking Stalin's Nose.
Norvelt itself is a real town in western Pennsylvania, founded as a New Deal community for struggling families and named, as the book's Miss Volker explains at length, for Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped establish it and whom she calls the greatest American woman who ever lived. The critic Josh Lacey called the novel defiantly political, praising how it recovers a piece of American history that had gone largely unremembered, and argued that the town itself, more than Jack, is the story's real hero.