A review by innerweststreetlibrarian
Beck by Mal Peet

4.0

I don't think I could have read this as a teenager or young adult and enjoyed it. Even now I have mixed feelings about it. The 4 stars are for the quality of the writing, which is excellent, especially for a posthumous collaborative work. The story is bleak. It is as exactly bad as you think it is going to be, and then some. It is just a little too hard for me to suspend disbelief enough to really think the ending was even remotely likely, if this was real life that kid froze or starved to death on a highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere. But then, Beck (and the rest of us with him), had suffered enough.