Gwendy, a compromise between her father who wanted to name her after his grandmother Gwendolyn and her mother who loved Wendy from Peter Pan, has decided to begin running the Suicide Stairs every morning because Frankie called her Goodyear— as in the blimp and others began to take up the chant. She wants to enter middle school without that moniker.
She has noticed a man in a suit, which is odd in this heat, sitting on the bench at the bottom of the steps all week. Then one day he calls out to her and they cautiously begin talking. His name is Me. Farris. And he has something for her. A button box. The lid has eight buttons on it and each on stands for a continent with the one for Antarctica being black and standing for everything and a red button that means whatever she wants it to mean. Inside are two levers. One dispenses a piece of chocolate the size of a jelly bean and it leaves you feeling satisfied and full. You’ll still eat your meals but you’ll avoid the second helpings and the snacks. The second lever reveals an 1891 uncirculated silver dollar known as a Morgan Dollar and worth quite a bit of money.
Later Gwendy will begin to remember that the buttons stand for blowing up continents and one for blowing up whatever she wants and another, a cancerous black one that blows everything up. These buttons begin to haunt her. And she both wishes she’d never gotten that box and is glad she did for she has grown into a gorgeous young woman whom her best friend is jealous of. But she makes new popular friends. And can have any guy she wants. Her life is better with the chocolates and the button box.
Then one night she decides to try out the buttons. So she investigates South America and what’s going on there. Then she pushes real hard down on the button and goes to watch the evening news where she hears about Jim Jones and the tragedy down there in Guyana and feels it’s all her fault.
Gwendy gets real nervous throughout the book about someone finding the box and pushing the black button so she moves it around and still someone finds it. Will she be there in time to stop them from discovering the box’s true purpose? This was a fantastic book and it has a sequel that I can’t wait to read. Oddly enough I’m on a diet myself like Gwendy trying to lapse a few pounds and I couldn’t help but think that those chocolates would sure come in handy! Though I could do without the buttons. This is indeed a creepy book but what else would you expect from the King of Horror? King really has a way of describing kids and how their thought process works. It’s pretty amazing for someone of his age to be able to do. Some writers lose touch with that part of themselves and can’t write convincingly about kids. But Gwendy was a very interesting character and this was one very interesting book. I give it five stars out of five stars.
Gwendy has a thought ( novel now in its adult implications, later to become a tiresome truth) secrets are a problem.
P 27-28
It’s a kind of morning that makes you wish death didn’t exist.
P 63
The best laid plans of sixteen-year-olds are rarely thought out.
P88
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