.com Review

An Best Book of the Month, February 2014: Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle defies easy description. To say that it’s a wild, over-the-top story of male adolescence, science gone wrong, the end of the world, and giant praying mantises sounds a little bit insane. And doesn’t begin to touch the warm and fuzzy bits (honesty, love, connection) that are a large part of what makes this book great. Narrator Austin Szerba is a unique historian of momentous things, including the nature of history itself, and his chronicle of family, how the end of the world began beside a dumpster in his small Iowa town, and what life is like when you’re sixteen and in love with two people, is something you won’t want to miss. --Seira Wilson

From Booklist

Simmering within Ealing, Iowa, is a deadly genetically engineered plague capable of unleashing unstoppable soldiers—six-foot-tall praying mantises with insatiable appetites for food and sex. No one knows it, of course, until Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release it on the world. An ever-growing plague of giant, flesh-hungry insects is bad enough, but Austin is also up to his eyeballs in sexual confusion—is he in love with Robby or his girlfriend, Shann? Both of them make him horny, but most things do. In an admittedly futile attempt to capture the truth of his history, painfully honest Austin narrates the events of the apocalypse intermingled with a detailed account of the “connections that spiderweb through time and place,” leading from his great-great-great-grandfather Andrzej in Poland to Shann’s lucky discovery of an apocalypse-proof bunker in her new backyard. Smith (Winger, 2013) is up to his old tricks, delivering a gruesome sci-fi treat, a likable punk of a narrator, and a sucker punch ending that satisfyingly resolves everything and nothing in the same breath. Grades 9-12. --Sarah Hunter

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