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[title]By Adam Rapp. Candlewick, $17.
Any recollection of your own awkward, awful middle-school years—acne, premiere pubic hairs—will pale in comparison with Adam Rapp's nightmarish vision of tweendom in new novel The Children and the Wolves. In it, kids pop "oxycottons" like candy, beat Child Services reps into comas and kidnap three-year-olds as part of a murder plot.
Bounce, Rapp's young protagonist, decides to take out an aging poet after he dares to question her in front of her honors eighth-grade English class. She lures male peers Wiggins and Orange into her quest with the promise of drugs, joyrides and sexual shenanigans. The trio kidnaps a girl identified as Frog in an attempt to raise money to buy a gun. They feign concern when their abduction makes the news, and pocket the money raised to ostensibly aid the search for the missing girl.
By alternating each chapter's point of view, noted downtown playwright Rapp delves into the disturbing psyches of each character. As he does so, he implies that these sorts of children—whose senses of reality are being warped as they live apart from authority figures—might pressure one another to commit heinous crimes reminiscent of Columbine. The novel's voice is clear, and Rapp has the kids' dialogue down, but the implausibility of their lives makes even this slim volume a difficult read. Being a teenagerpreteen? is undoubtedly different than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but if Children reflects the reality of today's kids, we should all fear for their futures.
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