The Electric Kid (Bantam Action) - Softcover

Grade 5-8?Blindboy and Hotwire are city kids in the year 2061, orphans who survive by mining, fixing, and selling electronic junk from the vast dumps they live on, and eating its slops when nothing else can be found. Blindboy can "hear" viable electronic circuits buried in the dump; Hotwire is a girl with a talent for tinkering and rewiring. Their skills draw the attention of the city's criminal underground, who decide to use the children to reproduce the tonal keys used with locks. Blindboy and Hotwire are kidnapped and coerced into performing a series of robberies and auto thefts. A clever escape brings them in contact with police detectives who then pursue the pair on a daredevil attempt to bring down the criminal underground. This is a bleak but believable urban future, echoing the vast differences in life styles between the haves and have-nots already evident in our cities today. It is a less developed and different picture of dump life than in Nancy Farmer's The Eye, the Ear and the Arm (Orchard, 1994). While Farmer emphasizes and examines the social structure and relationships on the dump, Kilworth emphasizes plot. It's brief and fast-moving, with more heroic deeds and unusual exploits than character development or philosophical musing. Blindboy and Hotwire are almost too clever and conscientious to be believed, but they make captivating characters. Readers will enjoy their brave and clever feats, follow their adventures avidly, and delight in the satisfying but not saccharine ending.?Susan L. Rogers, Chestnut Hill Academy, PA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 6^-9. Scattered among the stinking debris live the dump kids, homeless children and teens who spend their days searching for anything that will bring fast money or cheap food. Hotwire, a young woman so named because of her ingenious ability to fix anytxt `Books for Older Readershing electrical, and Blindboy, whose keen sense of hearing allows him to find things for Hotwire to repair, are inseparable friends in the scary, horrifying world of 2061. When the city's underworld learns of their skills, their lives assume new value--and terror--for now their talents must save them from death and the city from destruction. Kilworth pictures an oppressive future in which children are valueless and adults have lost all nurturing and compassion. Even his word choice and sparse sentence structure convey the bleakness and loss of hope. Although the conclusion, in which all the dump kids rally to protect Hotwire and Blindboy, isn't quite consistent with the earlier portrait of dump life, the story's ultimate strength lies, unfortunately, in its plausibility. Frances Bradburn