Come Back to Show You I Could Fly

Kliatt, Nov, 2004 by Mary Purucker

COME BACK TO SHOW YOU I COULD FLY. Robin Klein. 2003. Read by Dino Marnika. 4 cds. 5 hrs. Bolinda Audio. 1-74030-606-6. $32.00. Vinyl; plot notes. JS

Ten-year-old Seymour's mother has left him with a friend in the hope that he will be "safe" from a father who probably never would harm him. The controlling. uptight friend is under orders not to let Seymour go farther than the back garden and to get him to do his summer backlog of schoolwork. It is a boring life made more difficult by the restrictions to be clean, neat, polite, and to endure until his mother's new job begins. Eventually Seymour climbs over the alley wall and meets 20-year-old Angie, and they develop a friendship. He is unaware that she is trying to overcome drug addiction and is pregnant by a boyfriend who is now in prison. Angle is imaginative, lively, and quirky, a wonderful antidote for Seymour who is afraid of everything and everyone. She rakes him on excursions, but the good times cannot last and she falls prey to drugs again.

Marnika skillfully and believably brings to life Angie, Seymour and the other characters in their urban Australian setting. His flexible voice gives life to all. The novel won the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers in 1990. Mary Purucker, Beverly Hills P.L., Beverly Hills, CA