Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Children’s, Teenage & Educational

THE ALEX CROW

Andrew Smith

Skillfully blending multiple story strands that transcend time and place, award-winning Grasshopper Jungle author Andrew Smith chronicles the story of Ariel, a refugee who is the sole survivor of an attack on his small village.

Now living with an adoptive family in Sunday, West Virginia, Ariel's story is juxtaposed against those of a schizophrenic bomber and the diaries of a failed arctic expedition from the late nineteenth century . . . and a depressed, bionic reincarnated crow. Andrew Smith knew ever since his days as editor of his high school newspaper that he wanted to be a writer. His books include Grasshopper Jungle and Winger. Smith prefers the seclusion of his rural Southern California setting, where he lives with his family. Andrew Smith is the award-winning author of several YA novels, including Grasshopper Jungle, 100 Sideways Miles, Winger, and The Marbury Lens. Grasshopper Jungle won a Printz Honor and the Horn Book Award and is longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in the UK, among other prizes and awards. Grasshopper Jungle and 100 Sideways Miles (which was longlisted for the National Book Award) were on the 2014 best of the year lists at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, NPR, Kobo, and Mashable, among many others.

Available products
Book Published 2015-03-10 by Dutton Books for Young Readers

Comments

Behind the humor, horror, and abject strangeness of the lives readers encounter here, Smith takes them to a place where humanity is imbued with the potential to render people inhuman, turning them into something like gods who are not at all godlike, and remind us that being human, all too human, is far better than any conceivable alternative.

Smith is a spiritual heir to Kurt Vonnegut.

Anchored by Smith’s reliably strong prose with a distinct teenage-boy sensibility, the whole is a smartly cohesive exploration of survival and extinction, and the control humans have (or shouldn’t have) over such matters.

Like a constellation of distant stars, Smith aligns your perspective to see how these disparate stories actually make one shape – in this case, a crow who should not exist, and a boy who is lucky he remains among the living, too.

Fans of Smith’s raunchy, profane, and provocative work will find this funny but morally serious tale deeply appealing.

U.K.: Egmont

Smith’s writing seems to ebb from an honest place, not one of nostalgia, but of the discomfort and agony of adolescence. Smith follows up his enthralling, boundary-pushing Grasshopper Jungle with this more cohesive and brilliant work. A must-have for all YA collections.

Magnificently bizarre, irreverent and bitingly witty.

There’s no way this sci-fi tale about a war refugee at an American summer camp and a doomed 19th-century Arctic exploration should work—but it’s a surreal masterpiece.