#Candy apple books series

We gradually come to see him as less a man on the run from the law - though he’s certainly that - than a fugitive from everything the law has come to represent: end-stage capitalism, the military-industrial complex, data harvesting, cisgender white male privilege, perhaps even the social contract itself. In his new home, he dedicates himself to existing as much off the dreaded “grid” as possible: no lease, no bank account, virtually no human interaction. X ran a travel agency in his former life, which lends his choice of residence on the incongruously named Sugar Street an extra dash of irony. And what befalls him there is not, to put it mildly, the stuff of summer thrillers. The hideout he settles on is an apartment behind a decrepit two-story house in a medium-size postindustrial city. He’s headed not for Rio de Janeiro, however, or Hong Kong, or Casablanca, but to the most featureless, forgettable locale he can find - call it the Place Without Qualities. (The fact that he’s heading east, not west, is an early clue that this story has no intention of feeding us the genre bonbons we might crave.) X is looking not merely to escape, he tells us, but to disappear completely - to murder his former self and live out his remaining days as someone else. Our nameless narrator - hereafter to be referred to as “X” - is on the run: from the law, we soon gather, though the specifics of the crime remain vague. The novel opens with a bravura dissection of the romance of the American Interstate highway system: not the wide-open, liberating human river of Kerouac, but the constricting, recursive, hyper-surveilled Möbius strip of DeLillo. Dee is a risk taker, in other words, and his restless, adventurous, at times reckless approach is nowhere more evident than in his latest roll of the dice: the taut, bare-bones, not entirely user-friendly “Sugar Street.” Especially to his credit is the fact that he has resisted the considerable temptation, widespread among comfortably established writers, to endlessly refine (read: repeat) a successful formula, which often seems to be what readers want and publishers, however tacitly, demand. Source: Publisher's Weekly, January 1, 2007, p.Jonathan Dee, at 60 years of age and with eight books to his credit - one of which, “The Privileges,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 - should by now be regarded as, if not officially a national treasure, then at the very least a natural resource: a rare bird, perhaps, or a dependable supply of fresh water. The second Candy Apple title, Laura Dower's The Boy Next Door (ISBN 978-9-5), is due out simultaneously. Despite such contrivances, the tale convincingly conveys the social pressures of middle school, and the price and precariousness of popularity, offering a cheer-worthy blend of fluff and substance. The plot takes a melodramatic turn when Sophie is suddenly shunned by her old and new friends after she dances with a star football player on whom Kylie has long had a crush and whom the head cheerleader dated the previous year (for three weeks”). Attending practices without Kylie, Sophie initially feels like an outsider amidst the confident, popular and mostly petty other cheerleaders, but gradually gets sucked into their superficial social sphere. Rather predictably, gymnast Sophie makes the squad, but klutzy (if gutsy) Kylie is instead offered the position of team mascota costumed mule. Sophie reluctantly agrees to be Kylie's partner at tryouts for their middle school cheerleading team.

#Candy apple books series

The debut novel in the Candy Apple series introduces two very different 12-year-old best friends: introverted, quick-to-blush Sophie and outgoing, impulsive Kylie.