Module 7, part 1 - As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth

Bibliography

Perkins, L. R. (2010). As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth.  New York: Greenwillow Books.

Summary

Fifteen-year-old Ry has one mishap after another when he gets stranded in the middle of Montana with less than $100 cash and a near-dead cell phone.  Hiking to the nearest town, Ry meets Del who gives him food and a place to sleep for the night.  At the end of the next day, Del decides to drive Ry home to Illinois and they set out on the road together in Del’s altercated truck/jeep.  One hilarious situation after another finally leads them back to Ry’s home, but his grandpa is nowhere to be found.  On a whim, Ry and Del continue their journey south to try to find Ry’s parents who are on vacation in the Caribbean.  A smashed floor, a bumpy pot-hole strewn detour, a terrifying homemade-airplane ride, a boat ride that takes them far off course due to a mistaken error in direction, an accident that puts Del in the hospital, and another boat ride in which Ry’s boat goes under, finally leads him to his parents just in the nick of time.

My Thoughts

I have mixed feelings about this book.  While the situations Ry found himself in were truly hilarious and had me chuckling nearly all the way through the book, there came a point when it started to become exaggerated and I found myself wondering when it was going to come to an end.  I liked the book and I liked the writing.  But I think I would have loved it if it hadn’t gone on and on and on and on.  This week is realistic fiction and every disaster and calamity that happens to Ry is realistic, but everything taken together isn’t very probable, which to me, takes away from the reality of it.

Reviews

“This is a story of one misfortune after another.  As the book opens, Ry, a 16-year-old Wisconsin resident en route to camp, is left behind in Middle-of-Nowhere, MT, as his stalled train pulls out and he recounts the events that led him to leave the train in the first place.  Bad goes to worse: he loses a shoe and his phone charger, his grandfather back home is injured, and his parents are having their own misadventures in the Caribbean.  A superhero of a fix-it guy named Del helps Ry to put his life back together.  Along the way, readers learn that there is more to Del than initially meets the eye.  The story is told in a traditional episodic style, bounding from one calamity to the next.  The narration occasionally switches perspective to include the grandfather’s tale of woe as well as well-drawn graphic-style portrayals of the family dogs’ mishaps.  The style is reminiscent of Chris Crutcher’s, and the action is evocative of Gary Paulsen, but the freewheeling prose, quirky humor, and subtle life lessons are all Perkins’s own.  This novel is not going to be every teen boy’s cup of tea, but its charms are undeniable.”

Krippner, L. (2010, Jul). [Review of the book As Easy as Falling off the Face of the Earth by Lynne Rae Perkins]. School Library Journal, 56(7), p. 95.

Ideas for Use

I think this would be a great book to use as a creative writing assignment for kids and teens.  It could be a create-your-own adventure story.  You could read just the first part of the book where Ry gets stranded out in the middle of nowhere, and then the kids could write what they think would happen next and sort of make their own story.