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Chapter 19: Hyperdisappointed (Raina Overbrook)
Noah’s summer activities have really altered Donovan’s summer—he is contorted into a new existence based on what he knows and what he’s hiding. And for once, his sorry situation is not of his own making.
I was less impressed with Raina in this chapter than when we first met her—a bit sympathetic to her plight, to be sure, forced to reconcile her actual summer with the perfect one she’d imagined. Unfortunately, she seems a mix of defeatist and suspicious. But I’d bet her curiosity will uncover exactly what’s going on with the spiral sign-up sheets.
@Josh: Sign-up sheets! Are sign-up sheets inherently funny? I think they may be. I’ve never connected them between books. Thirty-one classmates signed up to feed Henrietta (THE CHICKEN DOESN’T SKATE). There was a popular one for the Antiflux Worm Shop (SON OF INTERFLUX). There wasn’t one for P.A.G. (SLACKER), and no one signed up to “help knit afghans for blitz-torn England” (DON’T CARE HIGH). Trey adds his name to the one for YAAP (FAKER), sealing his fate. There’s a sign-up for “International Night” (at which Jeff “didn’t sign up for Canada!”) (THE 6TH GRADE NICKNAME GAME). But the two you mentioned from Raymond Jardine and Douglas Fairchild are the truly iconic ones, for sure.