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Book Review of Nothing More Dangerous

Nothing More Dangerous
cathyskye avatar reviewed on + 2264 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


Young Boady Sanden has the type of voice that grabs hold of me and drags me right into the heart of a story. He's a typical fifteen-year-old boy who is blind to everything unless it has some impact on his own personal wants or desires. Boady isn't an "Us Versus Them" type of person, he's a good kid at heart, but author Allen Eskens does a superb job of showing how Boady has absorbed facets of racism without even realizing that he has done so. This is a lesson that many people need to learn, and Boady begins to learn his when the Elgins move in across the street.

Parts of the mystery surrounding what happened to Lida Poe are relatively easy to deduce, but not all of them, and the journey to Truth is mesmerizing. The scales begin to fall from Boady's eyes, and as he finally starts seeing people like his mother and his neighbor Hoke Gardner and his boss as individuals with their own lives and wants and needs, so do readers.

Nothing More Dangerous is a coming of age story that inexorably gathers momentum until it blossoms into something much larger than the sum of its parts. Boady Sanden's going to be with me for a long time, and I think he will be with you, too.