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Rat Life, by Tedd Arnold
Download Ebook Rat Life, by Tedd Arnold
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The dead body found in the Chemanga River has nothing to do with Todd. He’s been busy making beds at the family motel and writing alien stories to entertain his friends. Sure, a murder is big news, but what would really interest him? A paying job and a story line free of UFOs and poop jokes. And then he meets Rat.
Just a little older than Todd, Rat’s already been to Vietnam and back. He’s got a tattoo and a messed-up family life. And when he offers Todd a gig at the drive-in theater, Todd takes it. After all, it pays actual money. But hanging out with Rat leads to a host of strange experiences and perplexing questions. More and more, that corpse from the river is on Todd’s mind, and no matter how he shifts the pieces around, Rat is always part of the puzzle.
- Sales Rank: #1500449 in eBooks
- Published on: 2007-04-05
- Released on: 2007-04-05
- Format: Kindle eBook
From School Library Journal
Grade 6-10–Despite a slow start, this is a solid story set in the early 1970s, with a likable main character and a thrilling climax. Readers will sympathize with Todd, a creative, sensitive boy who helps his parents run a motel in upstate New York and dreams of becoming a writer. When he crosses paths with Rat, a moody young Vietnam veteran, he gets a job at the drive-in theater where Rat works, and finds himself fascinated by the young man, who is compelling but possibly dangerous. Todd begins to wonder if his new friend might have something to do with the unidentified body pulled out of the river. However, the mystery builds quietly as other elements take precedence, including Todd's encounter with an abandoned puppy and the subsequent rabies shots he must endure, his resentment over chores at the motel, his struggles to write a story for English class, and his grandmother's deteriorating mental condition. When the river floods, both Todd and Rat are caught up in the disaster, and the truth comes out at last. The final chapters are riveting, but readers hoping for a fast-paced mystery might be disappointed by the leisurely unfolding of events up to that point. More patient readers will enjoy the details of small-town life and identify with Todd's preoccupations and yearnings.–Miranda Doyle, San Francisco Public Library
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Fourteen-year-old Todd entertains his classmates with gross-out tales, concocting crude metaphors for diarrhea ("sewer stew"), but parallels with Arnold's irreverent picture books (Parts, 2004) end there. Goofy boyhood preoccupations fade early in this ambitious first novel, in which Todd's friendship with Rat, a soldier recently returned from Vietnam, awakens the adolescent to ethical ambiguities and often-cruel realities, and pushes his writing hobby in new directions. As details about Rat's background emerge, and incidents suggest he may fit the "ticking time bomb psycho" profile of a Vietnam vet, Todd reluctantly begins to trace links between his friend and an unsolved murder. The novel's slow, introspective first half may lose some readers, and there are too many subplots, including a catastrophic flood that feels abruptly introduced and unnecessarily sensational. Even so, Arnold is an impressively adept writer; especially strong is his portrayal of Rat, who keeps readers on the knife's edge between sympathy and mistrust and whose enigmatic persona lends as much credence to the book's classification as a mystery as its more traditional gumshoe elements. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Realistically and sensitively written as Todd’s own manuscript, this entertaining and thoughtful account is an absorbing snapshot of early 1970s life, as well as fast-paced coming-of-age fare that should appeal to young male readers.”—Kirkus Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Rat Life
By Steven Donald
The creator of a bunch of humorous picture books and a great new series of early readers ("Fly Guy") also does novels! Well at least he's done one, and it's quite good. It's narrated by fourteen year old Todd, who has some odd and interesting experiences during the spring of 1972. Most are related in some way to an older boy known only as "Rat." We eventually learn that Rat is a Vietnam vet whose childhood was about as bad as it gets. But when Todd meets him, he's a fascinating, slightly scary figure. It's easy to see why Todd is intrigued by Rat, but less clear in the beginning why this older young man would take an interest in a boy several years younger. The reasons are right there in the book, though, and Arnold neatly avoids hitting us over the head with them. It starts when Rat watches Todd put an injured dog out of her misery; this certainly must resonate with Rat's Vietnam experiences, but that's never stated, which is just right. The book is subtitled "a mystery," but the heart of the novel is really the relationship between these two characters. While Todd gets to know Rat better, he's also developing into a real writer. His shares early efforts with his friends and gets some praise from an English teacher, but it's through his experiences with Rat that he really starts to learn how to write what's important. Todd's interest in writing emerges in an intriguing introduction, where he tries out eight possible first lines for his book, rejecting each for different reasons. Besides being a great way to introduce a first person narrator, this allows him to plant some kernels related to future action that makes us want to learn more. It's the sort of device that can easily seem contrived, but it works perfectly here. It soon becomes clear that Rat must somehow be connected to a mysterious murder in town, and the discovery of how and why provides the main tension of the story. It all comes to a head when the town is flooded, and although this is the most dramatic action we see, it's also where I lost interest a bit. The flood scenes drag on a bit, and the near drownings are actually less involving than some of the tense, meaningful, conversations between Todd and Rat. It's not like any readers will quit midway, though. Both Todd and Rat are way too interesting.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Great for Reluctant Readers!
By L. K. Messner
I loved RAT LIFE, Tedd Arnold's first foray into young adult literature. The writing is funny at times and always fresh, and Arnold uses his main character's interest in the craft of writing to make some keen observations about the process.
This book made me laugh one minute and gasp in shock the next. Its narrator, Todd, is a would-be writer growing up in Upstate NY in 1972. In the first pages of the book, he hears about a body found in a river and meets a mysterious character who calls himself Rat. Todd wonders if Rat, an underaged recruit who's just back from a tour of Vietnam, has something to do with that body in the river, and those suspicions mount throughout the novel, all the way to its dizzying climax.
I could go on and on about the humor, the interesting writing strategies Arnold employed, the gut-wrenching scene that almost made me stop reading but is so important to the book... but I'll let you discover this one for yourself. Don't start reading until you have some time; you won't want to take breaks.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A Hard Story Worth Reading
By Mel Odom
Rat Life is pretty much billed as a mystery novel for teens, but I'd call it more of a coming of age tale. This is a harsher, bleaker story than I'd recommend for a lot of tens, though, and there's some historical references in it that I think a lot of kids today would struggle with. I grew up with the Vietnam War constantly in my face, and today's kids have had the Iraq and Afghanistan problems that are all around us, but I think the mood of the country is different.
I'd been thinking about handing this book off to my fourteen year old son because we share a lot of books and I really liked Todd's character and his stories of growing up and best friends. However, the incident with the puppy immediately put me off of that idea, and I have to admit it almost put me off of the book. I'm glad I didn't stop reading, though. The book is a powerful thing and a very hard thing, but I enjoyed it a lot overall.
Some readers aren't going to be able to handle the puppy plot at all, but I saw how it's important to the story, and to the way Todd gets to where he understands Rat. The scenes still disturb me, but I feel that it was harder for the author to write than for me to read.
I really like the way Todd was portrayed. His relationship with his teacher, his friends, and his family were fantastic. I loved the motel setting and how he had to make all of those beds. The author, Tedd Arnold, did a bang-up job of detailing the commonplace of Todd's life. Hmmm. Todd, Tedd, maybe more than a coincidence?
Rat was an interesting character too, but it was hard learning everything he had been through with his family and with the war. I was surprised to learn that kids that young had slipped through the cracks and got bloodied in Vietnam.
The mystery was involved and had several facets, all of them with clues and foreshadowings that the author delivered with skill. I was constantly trying to figure out whodunit, but I was more concerned with the relationship between Todd and Rat, and whether Todd would ever tell the story about the puppy to people that could truly help him.
The force of nature sequence at the end of the novel was enthralling and breath-taking, and I was desperately turning pages to see how everything turned out. Tedd Arnold has written and illustrated mostly children's books. Rat Life is his first foray into the YA market, and I hope it's not his last because he's got a lot of talent. I'd welcome another book about Todd and Rat to see how they got on after this one.
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