Grasshopper Jungle "Smith, Andrew"

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'A cool/passionate, gay/straight, male/female, absurd/real, funny/moving, past/present, breezy/profound masterpiece of a book.' Michael Grant, bestselling author of the GONE series.

If you're a fan of John Green, Michael Grant, Stephen King or Sally Green's Half Bad, get your pincers stuck into this.

In the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend Robby have accidentally unleashed an unstoppable army. An army of horny, hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises that only want to do two things. This is the truth. This is history. It's the end of the world. And nobody knows anything about it.

Funny, intense, complex and brave, Grasshopper Jungle is a groundbreaking, genre-bending, coming-of-age stunner.

Look out for Andrew's latest exciting novel The Alex Crow.

Praise for Grasshopper Jungle

'If you only read one book this year about sexually confused teens battling 6 foot tall head-chomping praying mantises in small town America, make it this one.' Charlie Higson, author of the bestselling Young Bond series.

'I devoured @marburyjack's wonderful 'cool/passionate' Grasshopper Jungle'.  Sally Green, author of Half Bad.

'Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith. You must read immediately. It's an absolute joy. Scary, funny, sexy. Trust me.'  Jake Shears, lead singer of The Scissor Sisters

'Not for the faint-hearted.  Mutant grasshoppers, rampant lust - a tale of teen self discovery that grips like a mating mantis.'  Metro

Andrew Smith has always wanted to be a writer. After graduating college, he wrote for newspapers and radio stations, but found it wasn't the kind of writing he'd dreamed about doing. Born with an impulse to travel, Smith, the son of an immigrant, bounced around the world and from job to job, before settling down in Southern California. There, he got his first 'real job', as a teacher in an alternative educational program for at-risk teens, married, and moved to a rural mountain location. Smith has now written several award-winning YA novels including Winger, Stick, and Grasshopper Jungle.

 

 

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.*** Copyright © 2014  by Andrew Smith Part 1: Ealing       I read somewhere that human beings are genetically predisposed to record history. We believe it will prevent us from doing stupid things in the future. But even though we dutifully archived elaborate records of everything we've ever done, we also managed to keep on doing dumber and dumber shit. This is my history. There are things in here: babies with two heads, insects as big as refrigerators, God, the devil, limbless warriors, rocket ships, sex, diving bells, theft, wars, monsters, internal combustion engines, love, cigarettes, joy, bomb shelters, pizza, and cruelty. Just like it's always been.   KIMBER DRIVE Robby Brees and I made the road the Ealing Mall is built on. Before we outgrew our devotion to BMX bicycles, the constant back-and-forth ruts we cut through the field we named Grasshopper Jungle became the natural sweep of Kimber Drive, as though the dirt graders and street engineers who paved it couldn't help but follow the tracks Robby and I had laid. Robby and I were the gods of concrete rivers, and history does prove to us that wherever boys ride bicycles, paved roadways ribbon along afterward like intestinal tapeworms. So the mall went up--built like a row of happy lower teeth-- grinned for a while, and then about a year ago some of the shops there began shutting down, blackening out like cavities when people left our town for other, better places. BMX riding was for middle-school kids. We still had our bikes, and I believe that there were times Robby and I thought about digging them out from the cobwebbed corners of our families' garages. But now that we were in high school--or at least in high school classes , because we'd attended Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy since kindergarten--we rode skateboards, and also managed to sneak away in Robby's old car. We were in tenth grade, and Robby could drive, which was very convenient for me and my girlfriend, Shann Collins. We could always depend on Robby. And I counted on the hope--the erotic plan I fantasized over--that one night he'd drive us out along the needle-straight roads cutting through the seas of cornfields surrounding Ealing, and Robby wouldn't say anything at all as I climbed on top of Shann and had sex with her right there on the piles of Robby's laundry that always seemed to lie scattered and unwashed in the dirty old Ford Explorer his dad left behind. ------ FIXING FEET On The Friday that ended our painfully slow first week after spring break, Robby and I took our boards and skated through the filthy back alley of Grasshopper Jungle. Nobody cared about skaters anymore. Well, at least nobody cared among the four remaining businesses that managed to stay open in the Ealing Mall after the McKeon plant closed down: The laundromat Robby never quite made it to, The Pancake House , and the liquor and thrift stores owned by Shann's stepdad. So we could skate there, and did pretty much whatever we wanted to do. Judging from the empty beer cans, the mysterious floral sleeper sofa we were certain was infested with pubic lice, and the pungent smell of piss in the alley, it was clear everyone else in Ealing was similarly okay with the no-limits code of conduct in Grasshopper Jungle, too. And that proved to be an unfortunate fact for me and Robby on that Friday. We had built ramps from sagging flaps of plywood that we laid across a flight of concrete steps behind a vacant unit that used to be a foot doctor's office. "Bad business plan," Robby said. "What?" "Fixing people's feet in a town everyone's dying to run away from." Robby was so smart it hurt my head to think about how sad he could be sometimes. "We should go into business," I said. "Want to have a fag?" Robby liked calling cigarettes fags . "Okay." There was no way we'd ever sit down on that couch. We upended blue plastic milk crates and sat with forearms resting across our knees while we propped our feet on our boards and rocked them back and forth like we floated over invisible and soothing waves. Robby was a better smoker. He could inhale thick, deep clouds of cigarette smoke and blow life-sized ghost models of both of us when he'd casually lean back and exhale. I liked cigarettes, but I'd never smoke if Robby didn't. "What kind of business?" Robby said. "I don't know. I could write stuff. Maybe comic books." "And you could draw me." Robby took a big drag from his cigarette. "I'd be like your spokes model or something." I have to explain. I have that obsession with history, too. In one corner of my closet, stacked from the floor to the middle of my thigh, sits a pile of notebooks and composition binders filled with all the dumb shit I've ever done. My hope was that, one day, my dumb history would serve as the source for countless fictional accounts of, well, shit. And I drew, too. There were thousands of sketches of me, of Shann and Robby, in those books. I consider it my job to tell the truth. "What, exactly, does a spokes model do?" "We speak. And look good at the same time. It's a tough job, so I'd expect to make decent money." "Multitasking." "The shit out of it , Porcupine." Robby called me Porcupine because of how I wore my hair. I didn't mind. Everyone else called me Austin. Austin Szerba. It is Polish. Sometimes, in wonder, I can marvel at the connections that spider web through time and place; how a dying bull in Tsarist Russia may have been responsible for the end of the world in Ealing, Iowa. It is the truth. When he was a young man, Andrzej Szczerba, who was my great-great-great-grandfather, was exiled from his home in a small farming village called Kowale. Andrzej Szczerba had been involved in a radical movement to resist the imposition of Russian language and culture on Poles. Andrzej, like many Polish boys, hoped that one day his country, which had been treated like a sausage between the dog jaws of selfish neighboring empires, would be able to stand on its own. It was a good idea, but it was not going to happen in Andrzej's lifetime. So Andrzej was forced to leave Kowale--and travel to Siberia. He did not get very far. The train carrying the exiled Andrzej derailed when it struck a dying bull that had collapsed on the tracks. It was a terrible accident. Andrzej was left, presumed dead, abandoned in the middle of a snowy field. Andrzej Szczerba wore a silver medallion with an image of Saint Casimir, who was the patron saint of Poland, on a chain around his neck. He believed Saint Casimir had saved his life in the train wreck, and every day for the rest of his life, Andrzej would kiss the medal and say a prayer, thanking Saint Casimir. It was a fortunate thing for me that Andrzej Szczerba did not die in that snowy field. Wounded, he walked for two days until he came to the town of Hrodna, where he hid from the Russians and ultimately married a Polish girl named Aniela Masulka, who was my great-great-great-grandmother. Andrzej's healthy Polish semen made four Catholic children with Aniela--two boys and two girls. Only one of them, his youngest son, Krzys, would ever end up near Ealing, Iowa. This is my history.   LOUIS ASKS A RHETORICAL QUESTION We leaned our backs against the cinder-block wall, smoking in the cut of shade from a green rolling dumpster, and at just about the same time I talked Robby into taking his car to drive us over to Shann Collin's new old house, I looked up and noticed the population of Grasshopper Jungle had increased uncomfortably. Four boys from Herbert Hoover High, the public school, had been watching us while they leaned against the galvanized steel railing along the edge of the stairway we had been using for a ramp. "Candy Cane faggots, getting ready to make out with each other in Piss Alley." The Candy Cane thing--that was what Hoover Boys enjoyed calling boys from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Not just because it kind of rhymed. We had to wear ties to school. Whoever invented the uniform could have planned better to avoid the striped red-and-white design of them. Because when we'd wear our ties, white shirts, and blue sweaters with the little embroidered crosses inside blood red hearts, you couldn't help but think we looked like, well, patriotic, Christian-boy candy canes. But Robby and I weren't big enough losers to still be wearing our uniforms while skating. Well, we weren't so much skating as smoking cigarettes, actually. Robby wore a Hormel Spam T-shirt and baggy jeans with holes in them he sagged so low you could see half his citrus-motif boxers. They had oranges and lemons on them. Citrus does not grow in Iowa. I wore yellow-and-green basketball shorts and a black Orwells tee. So we didn't look like candy cane boys. The Orwells are a punk band from Illinois. The other part--the faggot part--well, let's just say Robby got picked on. A lot. I only knew one of the boys: Grant Wallace. It's hard not to know pretty much every kid in a town the size of Ealing, even if you didn't pay too much attention to people as a rule. However, I did know this: Grant and his friends were there for no other reason than to start crap. It was bound to be historic, too. And two 140-pound Candy Cane faggot sophomores with cigarettes and skateboards were not likely to stop anything four bored and corn-fed twelfth-graders from Hoover had in mind. Robby just sat back casually against the wall, puffing away on his cigarette. I couldn't help but think he looked like a guy in one of those old black-and-white movies about firing squads and blindfolds and the Foreign Legion and shit like that. One of Grant's friends, a pudgy guy with a face full of whiteheads and only one eyebrow, took his cell phone out from his pocket and began recording video of us. Consult history: Nothing good ever happens when cell phones are used to record video. And I guess that was as good as Grant's directorial cue to begin. "Let me and Tyler borrow you guys' skateboards for a few minutes. We'll bring them back." Tyler must have been the mule-faced kid on Grant's right, because he nodded, all excited, an encouragement for us to be cooperative Candy Cane faggots . But Robby said no before the question was entirely out of Grant's mouth. The truth is--and history will back me up on this, too--that when kids like Grant ask kids like me and Robby if they can borrow stuff like skateboards, the boards are either going to get stolen, or the kids like me and Robby are going to be beaten up and then the boards are going to get stolen. The way kids like me and Robby get beaten up first is when one of them says no. History class is over for today. We got beaten up by Grant Wallace, Tyler, and some other kid who smelled like he had barf on his sleeves, while the fourth kid filmed it with his cell phone. Oh, and extra credit in history: You should never wear loose mesh basketball shorts and boxer underwear if you're going to get kneed in the balls. Just so you know for the future. I don't even think either one of us made it all the way to his feet before the kicks and punches started. Robby got a bloody nose. Grant took our boards and chucked them up onto the roof of The Pancake House . Then the four Hoover Boys took our shoes off and threw them on the roof, too. And if the boards didn't make such a racket when they landed, Grant and his friends would have taken Robby's and my pants and sent them up to shoe-and-skateboard heaven, too. But the Chinese guy named Louis who worked in the kitchen of The Pancake House stuck his face out the back door, and asked, politely, what we thought we were doing. I do not know what I thought I was doing. But that question, in itself, when asked by a Chinese pancake chef named Louis, was enough to make Grant and his friends call an end to their diversion. I was curled up on my side, cupping my nuts, while the sleeve of my black Orwells T-shirt adhered to some gooey piss stain on Grasshopper Jungle's asphalt. Grant and the Hoover Boys left, and Louis, apparently satisfied with the lack of an answer to his rhetorical question about what we boys thought we were doing, shut the door. For a moment, I found myself wondering, too, why guys like Grant Wallace, who called guys like me and Robby Brees faggots , always seemed to take pleasure in removing the trousers of littler guys. That would be a good question for the books, I thought.   THERE'S BLOOD ON YOUR SPAM "Are you hurt?" "Balls. Knee. Boxers." "Oh. Um." "There's blood on your Spam." "Shit." ------   GRANT WALLACE MURDERED ME Robby felt bad, not because of his bloody nose. Because he blamed himself when things like this happened. He cried a little, and that made me sad. We recovered. History shows, after things like that, you either get up and have a cigarette, in your socks, with your bloody friend, or you don't. Since it wasn't time for Robby and me to die, we decided to have a smoke. I believe Andrzej Szczerba would have wanted a smoke when he pulled himself, bloodied, up from the wreckage in that snowy field in Poland. There are as many theories on how to deal with a bloody nose as there are ears of corn in all the combined silos of Iowa. Robby's approach was artistic. Propping himself dog-like on his hands and knees, he hung his head down, depositing thick crimson coins of blood from his nostrils and simultaneously puffing a cigarette, while he drip-drip-dripped a pointillist message on the blacktop: GRANT WALLACE MURDERED ME I watched and smoked and wondered how our shoes and skateboards were getting along, up there on the roof. Unfortunately, as funny as it was to both of us, Robby stopped bleeding after forming the second A, so he only got as far as GRANT WA "Nobody's going to know what that means," I said. "I should have used lowercase." "Lowercase does use less blood. And a smaller font. Everyone knows that." "Maybe you should punch me again." I realized I'd never punched anyone in my life. "I don't think so, Robby. You got any quarters on you?" "Why?" "Let's go throw our shirts in the laundry place. You need to learn how to use those things anyway." So Robby and I limped around to the front of the mall and went inside Ealing Coin Wash Launderette, where, maximizing the return on our investment, we not only washed our T-shirts, but the socks we had on as well. "This is boring," Robby observed while we waited for the fifth dime we slotted into the dryer to magically warm the dampness and detergent from our clothes. "No wonder I never come here." "Doesn't your apartment building have a laundry room?" "It's nasty." "Worse than this?" "This? This is like Hawaii, Porcupine. Sitting here with you, barefoot, with no shirts on, watching socks and shit go around." Robby lived alone with his mom in a tiny two-bedroom at a place called the Del Vista Arms, a cheap stucco apartment building only three blocks from Grasshopper Jungle. We walked there, in our damp laundered socks and T-shirts. Two of the apartments on Robby's floor had Pay or Quit notices taped to their doors. "Wait here," he said, and he quietly snuck inside. It meant his mother was home. Robby usually didn't like people to come over when his mom was there. I knew that. He was just going to get the keys to the Ford and take me for a ride, anyway. So I waited. "The blood didn't come out of your Spam shirt," I said. We drove west, down Mercantile Street toward my house, and I noticed the diffused brown splotches of post-laundered blood that dotted Robby's chest. And he was still in his socks, too. "I'll loan you a pair of shoes when we get to my house," I offered. "Then let's go get Shann and do something." I glanced over my shoulder and checked out the backseat. I wondered if I would ever not be horny, or confused about my horniness, or confused about why I got horny at stuff I wasn't supposed to get horny at. As history is my judge, probably not.] "I think we should go up on the roof and get our shit back. Tonight, when no one will see us. Those were my best shoes." Actually, those were Robby's only non-Lutheran-boy school shoes. I was willing. "I bet there's some cool shit up on that roof," I said. "Oh yeah. No doubt everyone in Ealing hides their cool shit up on the roof of The Pancake House." "Or maybe not."   WHAT MADE THIS COUNTRY GREAT Robby had an older sister named Sheila. Sheila was married and lived with her husband and Robby's six-year-old nephew in Cedar Falls. I had a brother named Eric. Eric was in Afghanistan, shooting at people and shit like that. As bad as Cedar Falls is, even the Del Vista Arms for that matter, Eric could have gone somewhere better than Afghanistan. Both our moms took little blue pills to make them feel not so anxious. My mom took them because of Eric, and Robby's mom needed pills because when we were in seventh grade, Robby's dad left and didn't come back. My dad was a history teacher at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, and my mom was a bookkeeper at the Hy-Vee, so we had a house and a dog, and shit like that. Hy-Vee sells groceries and shit. My parents were predictable and ominous. They also weren't home yet when Robby and I got there in our still-wet socks and T-shirts. "Watch out for dog shit," I said as we walked across the yard. "Austin, you should mow your lawn." "Then it would make the dog shit too easy to see and my dad would tell me to pick it up. So I'd have to mow the lawn and pick up dog shit." "It's thinking like that that made this country great," Robby said. "You know, if they ever gave a Nobel Prize for avoiding work, every year some white guy in Iowa would get a million bucks and a trip to Sweden." Thinking about me and Robby going to Sweden made me horny. Excerpted from Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Assuming the role of a historian (a wildly obscene historian), 16-year-old Austin Szerba chronicles the end of the world as it begins in his small Iowa town. Austin is in love with two people-his girlfriend, Shann, and his best friend Robby; neither of them is okay with it but, as Austin frequently repeats, "I was so confused." This confusion worsens when a series of missteps results in the propagation of six-foot tall, superstrong, mantislike Unstoppable Soldiers that portend a new world order on Earth. Sex is everywhere in this novel (only some of it involving humans), but Smith (Winger) describes it in purposefully clinical and utterly unromantic terms, making connections between the Unstoppable Soldiers-who "wanted only to fuck and eat"-and human beings, whose preoccupations aren't, perhaps, so different. Filled with gonzo black humor, Smith's outrageous tale makes serious points about scientific research done in the name of patriotism and profit, the intersections between the personal and the global, the weight of history on the present, and the often out-of-control sexuality of 16-year-old boys. Ages 14-up. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

School Library Journal Review

Gr 10 Up-It used to be that the only interesting events to occur in crumbling Ealing, Iowa happened between the pages of 16-year-old Austin Szerba's "history" journals. Austin's journals are elaborate and uncensored records about sex; his love for his girlfriend, Shann; his growing attraction for his best friend, Robby; his unique Polish ancestors; even Ealing's decrepit mini-mall where he and Robby hang out. Shann tells Austin, "I love how, whenever you tell a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion." And that's exactly how Austin narrates the end of the world when a twist of fate sparks the birth of mutant, people-eating praying mantises. Austin not only records the hilarious and bizarre tale of giant, copulating bugs but his own sexual confusion and his fear about hurting the people he loves. Award-winning author Smith has cleverly used a B movie science fiction plot to explore the intricacies of teenage sexuality, love, and friendship. Austin's desires might garner buzz and controversy among adults but not among the teenage boys who can identify with his internal struggles. This novel is proof that when an author creates solely for himself-as Smith notes in the acknowledgments section-the result is an original, honest, and extraordinary work that speaks directly to teens as it pushes the boundaries of young adult literature.-Kimberly Garnick Giarratano, Rockaway Township Public Library, NJ (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Simmering within Ealing, Iowa, is a deadly genetically engineered plague capable of unleashing unstoppable soldiers six-foot-tall praying mantises with insatiable appetites for food and sex. No one knows it, of course, until Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release it on the world. An ever-growing plague of giant, flesh-hungry insects is bad enough, but Austin is also up to his eyeballs in sexual confusion is he in love with Robby or his girlfriend, Shann? Both of them make him horny, but most things do. In an admittedly futile attempt to capture the truth of his history, painfully honest Austin narrates the events of the apocalypse intermingled with a detailed account of the connections that spiderweb through time and place, leading from his great-great-great-grandfather Andrzej in Poland to Shann's lucky discovery of an apocalypse-proof bunker in her new backyard. Smith (Winger, 2013) is up to his old tricks, delivering a gruesome sci-fi treat, a likable punk of a narrator, and a sucker punch ending that satisfyingly resolves everything and nothing in the same breath.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist

Horn Book Review

Unfortunate coincidences involving sixteen-year-old Austin and his best friend Robby lead to the unleashing of gigantic, ravenous praying mantises related to a diabolical scientist's decades-old experiments. Austin's love for and attraction to both his girlfriend and to Robby is the powerful emotional backbone of this intricate, grimly comedic apocalypse story, in which Smith proves himself a daring and original wordsmith. (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Book Review

A meanderingly funny, weirdly compelling and thoroughly brilliant chronicle of "the end of the world, and shit like that." This is not your everyday novel of the apocalypse, though it has the essential elements: a (dead) mad scientist, a fabulous underground bunker, voracious giant praying mantises and gobs of messy violence. As narrated by hapless Polish-Iowan sophomore Austin Szerba, though, the "shit like that" and his love for it all take center stage: his family, including his older brother, whose testicles and one leg are blown off in Iraq; his mute, perpetually defecating golden retriever; the dead-end town of Ealing, Iowa; his girlfriend, Shann Collins, whom he desperately wants to have sex with; and most importantly, his gay best friend, Robby Brees, to whom he finds himself as attracted as he is to Shann. His preoccupation with sex is pervasive; the unlikeliest things make Austin horny, and his candor in reporting this is endearing. In a cannily disjointed, Vonnegut-esque narrative, the budding historian weaves his account of the giant-insect apocalypse in and around his personal family history and his own odyssey through the hormonal stew that is adolescence. He doesn't lie, and he is acutely conscious of the paradox that is history: "You could never get everything in a book. / Good books are always about everything." By that measure, then, this is a mighty good book. It is about everything that really matters. Plus voracious giant praying mantises. (Science fiction. 14 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.