Duckegg & Persons of Interest

NovaMelia
Outskirts Press (2010)
ISBN 9781432759223
Reviewed by Leslie Granier for Reader Views (09/10)

 

Terrance “Duckegg” Duckworth is an average sixteen-year-old boy.  He likes to skip school and go fishing in a nearby pond.  Duckegg, as well as his younger siblings Billy and Lucy, are often left unsupervised while their divorced mother is either working or hunting for a man to love her.  Consequently, they often find themselves in trouble.  When a pharmaceutical company in the area is rumored to be conducting gruesome experiments on stray animals, they decide for public relations purposes to permit a field trip by the local school.  Naturally, the kids have more questions and suspicions than the company is willing to address, leading them to do some covert investigating.  This sets off a chain of events that no one in the town could have anticipated.

While there are humorous aspects to this story, it focuses mainly on the desperation felt by a poor family in a small town.  Martha, the mother, is more concerned with pleasing men than she is with supervising her children because she is lonely and bitter since her divorce. Duckegg is desperate to remain young and carefree even though he is the man of the house.  Billy, the middle child, craves attention and wants so badly to be grown.  The youngest, Lucy, is practically living with another family and is in need of motherly affection.  In addition to their individual plights, the Duckworth family must resort to stealing to get the basic necessities of life.

There are several diverse aspects to this book.  The part of the story that deals with the experiments at the pharmaceutical company is interesting but I wish the author had been more specific about the testing they were doing and the results they obtained.  The scenes with Duckegg’s teacher, Miss Whitaker, are enlightening.  Watching the bond develop between them was touching.  The relationships between several sets of characters in terms of dominance and subservience are well-developed.

“Duckegg & Persons of Interest” is written mainly for a young adult to middle-aged audience.  It tells a good story but I wish the author had taken the plot a little deeper.  The formatting was somewhat distracting at times in that when different scenes within a chapter began there was no spacing between the paragraphs.  It sometimes took me a while to realize a completely different topic had begun.

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