Pleasant bar. We are a friendly town." There goes baseball and and a happy carefree summer! The book concludes with Jack being picked up in his dad's J-3 and doing some "bombing runs" with paint-filled balloons on the Viking drive-in theater, during which he decides it isn't that fun and asks to be let down back on the ball field. You have totally convinced me to grab this one on audio.

He fires the gun just as a bad guy emerges from the bushes and he fires. Miss Volker doesn't treat Jack like a child. Since Miss Volker is the town historian, Jack also learns about the importance of history and learning from it.

She notices that elderly, "original Norvelters" are dying away mysteriously. For example, when the whole fleet of Hell's Angels come roaring into town, Jack gets really nervous and starts doing jumping jacks and shouts, "Welcome to Norvelt!

Events . Finally, an inset paragraph (styled after the "In this day in history" section that Miss Volker employed Jack to type along with the obits in the Norvelt news) talks about Jack being ungrounded. Miss Volker was one of the original Norvelters and made a promise to the town's founder, Eleanor Roosevelt, that she would care for the original residents and see them to their graves.

The Newbery Medal judges, who are American children's librarians, cited the importance of history and reading. Soon, Miss Volker is placed under house arrest when the police find chocolates, gifted to her by her one-way lover Mr. Spizz, poisoned with 1080 (to kill rodents) in her basement and accuse her of feeding them to the old Norvelters. Print Word PDF. The "dancing plague" 100. When an autopsy reveals that the latest victim was full of rat poison, the police know they have a mass murderer on their hands.

Dead End in Norvelt is the winner of the 2012 Newbery Medal for the year’s best contribution to children’s literature and the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. Jack is also freed from his summer-long grounding, but has learned from Miss Volker that only fools ignore history.

There are plenty of suspects - even Jack's own parents! Dead End in Norvelt Characters .

One more example: Jack's nose bleeds whenever he gets nervous or scared or sick about anything. "[T]he real hero of the novel isn't Jack himself, but his home town and its values. It's interesting and exciting, and each event has a point and moves Jack's story forward. I think many 11- and 12-year-old boys will be able to relate to Jack's decisions, and hopefully, man up and make the right decisions themselves. He's a 12 year-old boy with a nose that never seems to stop bleeding. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of “Dead End In Norvelt” by Jack Gantos. He called Jack after he left to let him know where Miss Volker was. His summer is ruined since he is grounded. Miss Volker is the town's medical examiner and a former nurse. He has to helps his neighbor, Miss. [6], Newbery medal judges called the book "achingly funny"[4] and one British reviewer called it "rib-splitting".[7].

In the obituary she wrote, what does Miss Volker suggest the dead Hell’s Angel brought to Norvelt? Miss Volker is a fiesty old lady that has made a promise to Eleanor Roosevelt that she would write the obituaries for the last of the original Norvelter's. It's the summer of 1962, and Jack's vacation is ruined when his Mom grounds him for the entire summer. That is until Miss Volker performed a surgery on him. I don't know why, but this scene struck me as incredibly funny. Dr. Metz recommends... © 2020 Shmoop University Inc | All Rights Reserved | Privacy | Legal. He accidentally fired off his dad's Japanese rifle and plowed his mom's cornfield which lead to him being grounded for the whole summer. Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is “grounded for life” by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets.

Disclosure: I am an Amazon affiliate, so some links are affiliate links. Jack runs and gets a Japanese rifle so he can pretend to shoot the enemies on the drive-in screen. however, a bullet somehow flies out, causing a nosebleed.