Beetle Boy
Binding: Hardcover
Age 13+
General Fiction
Thought provoking and troubling, Willey continues her career-long skillful exploration of the complicated relationships between teenage children and their broken parents.
Margaret Willey explores the subtle and not-so-subtle ways parents can fail children and the long-term consequences of those failures. When Charlie's mother walked out on the family, eight-year-old Charlie tried to comfort his devastated father by telling him the silly beetle boy stories his mother used to tell him. His father latches on to those stories as a get-rich-quick scheme, and soon he's parading Charlie all over the state as the world's youngest author, hawking
cheaply produced picture book versions of the stories his long-gone mother used to tell. Charlie's childhood becomes a public nightmare he only manages to escape when he becomes too old for his title--at which point Charlie's younger brother takes on the role and even the name in his father's doomed attempt to keep the con going.
Creators
Margaret Willey has published in many genres-picture books, fiction, and poetry. In 2002, Clever Beatrice (Atheneum, 2001) won the Charlotte Zolotow Award for best text in a picture book. Her most recent picture book is The 3 Bears and Goldilocks (Atheneum, 2008). She has written six young adult novels, most recently Four Secrets (Carolrhoda Lab, 2012) which was given the Booklist Top 10 Crime Fiction for Youth award and about which The Horn Book Magazine said, ""the four secrets are satisfyingly juicy yet given depth by Willey's understanding of the complexities of friendship.""