Surrender

by Sonya Hartnett

Overview

"Sophisticated young readers will be awed by the delicate, measured, heartbreaking portrait that emerges." – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

As life slips away, Gabriel looks back over his brief twenty years, which have been clouded by frustration and humiliation. A small, unforgiving town and distant, punitive parents ensure that he is never allowed to forget the horrific mistake he made as a child. He has only two friends - his dog, Surrender, and the unruly wild boy, Finnigan, a shadowy doppelganger with whom the meek Gabriel once made a boyhood pact. But when a series of arson attacks grips the town, Gabriel realizes how unpredictable and dangerous Finnigan is. As events begin to spiral violently out of control, it becomes devastatingly clear that only the most extreme measures will rid Gabriel of Finnigan for good.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763660055
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	06/26/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	HL710L (what's this?)
File size:	649 KB
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Sonya Hartnett is the award-winning author of many novels for teens, including Thursday’s Child, What the Birds See, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, The Ghost’s Child, Butterfly, and the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Surrender, as well as a number of books for younger readers. In 2008, Sonya Hartnett was awarded the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for her body of work. She lives in Australia.

“I chose to narrate the story through a child because people like children, they want to like them,” says Sonya Hartnett of Thursday’s Child, her brilliantly original coming-of-age story set during the Great Depression. “Harper [the young narrator] is the reason you get sucked into the characters. Even I, who like to distance myself from my characters, felt protective of her.”

The acclaimed author of several award-winning young adult novels—the first written when she was just thirteen—Australian native Sonya Hartnett says she wrote Thursday’s Child in a mere three months. “It just pulled itself together,” she says. “I’d wanted to set a story in the Depression for some time, in an isolated community that was strongly supportive. Once the dual ideas of the boy who tunneled and the young girl as narrator gelled, it almost wrote itself—I had the cast, I had the setting, I just said ‘go.’” Accustomed to writing about edgy young adult characters, Sonya Hartnett says that identifying with a seven-year-old protagonist was a challenge at first. “I found her difficult to approach,” she admits. “I’m not really used to children. But once I started, I found you could have fun with her: she could tell lies, she could deny the truth.” Whereas most children know “only what adults want them to know,” the author discovered she could bypass that limitation by “turning Harper into an eavesdropper and giving her older siblings to reveal realities.”

In her second book with Candlewick Press, What the Birds See, Sonya Hartnett once again creates a portrait of childhood. This time the subject is Adrian, a nine-year-old boy living in the suburbs with his gran and uncle. For Adrian, childhood is shaped by fear: his dread of quicksand, shopping centers, and self-combustion. Then one day, three neighborhood children vanish—an incident based on a real case in Australia in the 1960s—and Adrian comes to see just how tenuous his safety net is. In speaking about Adrian, the author provocatively reveals parallels between herself and her character. She says, “Adrian is me in many respects, and many of the things that happen to him happened to me.”

Sonya Hartnett’s consistently inspired writing has built her a legion of devotees. Of Thursday’s Child, Newbery Honor–winning author Carolyn Coman says, “Hartnett’s beautifully rendered vision drew me in from the very start and carried me along, above and under ground, to the very end. This book amazed me.” The achingly beautiful What the Birds See has just as quickly garnered critical acclaim. Notes Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “Hartnett again captures the ineffable fragility of childhood in this keenly observed tale. . . . Sophisticated readers will appreciate the work’s acuity and poetic integrity.” Sonya Hartnett’s third young adult novel, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Her novels also include Surrender, a mesmerizing psychological thriller and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and The Silver Donkey, a gently told fable for middle-grade readers. In 2008, she received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

Read an Excerpt

"I remember my first sight of him - the sound and scavenger look of him - surrounded by summer; I remember the stillness of the day and the density of the air. Neither of us was older than nine or ten. I was skimming a car along the garden fence when Finnigan crossed the brink of my vision. At first I feigned ignorance or disdain of his presence, but the car beneath my fingertips bunny-hopped and soon stalled. I slid a glance at him. At school we had seen a wildlife film projected onto a wall, and the boy who was watching me was a hyena. His dark eyes were set apart and seemed to have no arena of white. He didn't move or say a thing but I knew, just from his watching, that he could sever my arm. We were the same height and same age and built along similar leggy lines, but he was a hyena while I was a small, ashy, alpine moth. From the footpath side of the fence he stared at me, and my gaze floated grudgingly from the toy. He swiped a fly from his face. "You're that boy," he said.

". . .What boy?"

"You know. That boy. You know. What you did. Everybody knows."

___________

SURRENDER by Sonya Hartnett. Copyright © 2006 by Sonya Hartnett. Published by Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Surrender"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Sonya Hartnett.
Excerpted by permission of Candlewick Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

A literary psychological thriller, hauntingly told, of a lonely, ostracized boy who "since childhood had been building a wall meant to protect [him] from the worst of the harm." Anwell, renamed Gabriel, "the messenger, the teller of astonishing truths," is 20 years old and dying of an unnamed illness. Through flashbacks, and from alternating perspectives, Hartnett's grim, beautifully written tale of adolescent yearnings gone awry gradually unfolds. Isolated in a home with punitive, repressive parents, trapped in a country town that "has as many eyes as a fly," where he can never live down a fatal mistake he made when he was seven, Gabriel makes a secret, binding boyhood pact with Finnigan, an unpredictable gypsy-child, in which he surrenders his right to do wrong, and after which unsolved violent incidents occur. The reader is caught by the many layers of mystery, and by the resilient lyricism, the powerful imagery. The clues piece together masterfully, as what was set up as a complex friendship between two boys and their beloved dog evolves into a chilling story of love, guilt, revenge and sorrow. Sophisticated young readers will be awed by the delicate, measured, heartbreaking portrait that emerges. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews

Humphrey Bower is simply sensational as 20-year-old Anwell, confined to bed, bitter, and dying horribly. As a terrified 7-year-old charged with keeping his handicapped brother quiet, Anwell accidentally suffocated him. Neither his cold, distant father nor his emotionally disturbed mother can forgive him. His comfort comes from a pact made with his friend, Finnigan. Finnigan does the "bad things," so Anwell won't have to. Bower's artistry keeps listeners wondering about Finnigan. Is he the perpetrator of a series of arsons in isolated Mulyan, "a town of abominable secrets and myth"? Is he real, or merely Anwell's shadow made substance? In Sonya Hartnett's beautifully written, unflinching look at guilt, mental illness, and death, Bower's voicing is a small miracle of subtlety and insight. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2007 Audies Award Finalist © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

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