Camouflage [Hardcover]

In this overdrawn yet thrilling high drama, 14-year-old Kyle is fed up with his overprotective mother and her "cop" boyfriend and is eager to take off to Michigan to spend the summer with his father. However, his Midwest vacation takes on nightmarish proportions as the teenager is drawn into his father's circle of friends, a group of right-wing militants prepared to take the law into their own hands. Miklowitz's (Standing Tall, Looking Good) taut narrative traces Kyle's descent into a world ruled by hatred, racism and violence. Kyle's father, after presenting his son with a camouflage suit ("Back home, if [Kyle] wore this, he'd be the envy of all his friends!") and teaching him how to shoot a gun, leads his son into battle against officials ready to foreclose a neighbor's farm. Once Kyle realizes that bloodshed and destruction are in store, it is too late for him to back out. This action-packed drama challenges readers to examine conventional notions of freedom, loyalty and manhood. Kyle's emotional turmoil is genuine, even if events (e.g., the bombing of a government building) appear extreme and characterizations (e.g. "If he was going to have friends... he better go along with the flow, bite his tongue and not judge," are Kyle's thoughts when he meets a teen leader), occasionally superficial. Hearts will be racing as Kyle desperately seeks escape from external and internal warfare. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Grade 8-10?Fourteen-year-old Kyle's summer visit to his father in northern Michigan takes a surprising turn when the teen becomes enmeshed in a right-wing militia's plot to wage war on the federal government. Within the first hour of reconnecting with Dad, Kyle is thrilled to be offered the truck to drive, a cigarette, gun lessons, and maybe even a motorcycle. His father gives him a camouflage suit and the teen gets a buzz cut to fit in with the young people he meets. At a party, he encounters an older girl who comes to his house the next day and makes sexual advances toward him. His anticipation for a great summer wanes and his confusion and fear build as he learns more about his father, the "General," and Operation Desperate, a plan to fight perceived government control by blowing up a federal building. Although the ending is a bit melodramatic, it is not pat. After some hesitation, Kyle turns his father in; this intervention saves some lives, but not all. The novel, reading as it does like today's headlines, is a thought-provoking discussion-starter.?Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miklowitz (Past Forgiving, 1995, etc.), manipulating aspects of current events into a unclouded message, sends a Los Angeles teenager out of the frying pan and into the fire: He escapes his mother, whom he finds unreasonable and demanding, by moving in with his admired father, who turns out to be the leader of an underground militia. With the prospect of learning how to drive, shoot, perhaps even ride his father's horse, Kyle's summer in Michigan looks bright. An initial meeting with a local boy, Hiram, a 16-year-old buzz-cut bigot, and his unsavory friends takes some of the shine off, but all Kyle's pleasure turns to alarm as he discovers that the house has been searched, sees the inventory of his father Ed's ``gun club,'' and hears his anti-government talk. The club is on the march when the IRS seizes a neighbor's farm for back taxes; in the armed confrontation, Hiram is killed. Kyle watches fearfully as Ed vengefully plants a van full of explosives beneath a federal building in Lansing, and, wrestling down his stubborn loyalty, escapes and blows the whistle. When the bomb goes off, the building has been partially evacuated, but the book trails off as the numbers of dead (53) and injured (119) are tallied. Several questions are unanswered, such as who shot Hiram, and the identity of the mysterious prowlers; still, along with the moderately suspenseful plot, Miklowitz creates a realistic conflict in Kyle between his hero worship and his emerging sense of right and wrong. (Fiction. 11-13) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.