Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes
- Book Review,
by WENDELIN VAN DRAANEN
Amazon.com
Not normally a mall rat, young Sammy Keyes somehow finds herself at the video arcade with her best friend one day, blowing off steam before the big junior-high softball tournament. Naturally, fans of this plucky girl detective (Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy, Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy, etc.) will not be at all surprised to learn that this innocent outing winds up putting Sammy in the middle of another big, messy, dangerous mystery. In spite of her best intentions, our sleuth is soon exploring the seamy underbelly of her hometown, confronting gang members, pursuing a man with "hatred for eyes, steel for a mouth," and trying to take care of an abandoned infant--all while remaining undercover at her grandmother's adults-only apartment complex. Newcomers and veterans of the Sammy Keyes mystery series will immediately take to this not-so-hard-boiled seventh-grade detective and her funny yet issue-laden adventures. (Ages 10 and older) --Emilie Coulter
From Publishers Weekly
The intrepid detective lays her life on the line when she hunts down her latest suspect, a reptilian-looking fellow, in Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes, the seventh in the series by Wendelin Van Draanen. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 5-8-The unconventional girl detective is back in her seventh adventure. The upcoming Junior Sluggers' Cup tournament is all Sammy's friend Marissa will talk about, so Sammy suggests they go to the arcade to take her mind off it. While there, Sammy is literally left holding the bag as a stranger, who is frantically trying to hide from a scary-looking man, asks her to watch a bundle. Inside, the junior sleuth finds a baby. After a difficult night, she turns the infant over to her friend Officer Borsch. However, she now feels that she must find out who and where the baby's mother is before she is hurt (or worse) by the man with "hatred for eyes" and "steel for a mouth." The search takes Sammy and Marissa into the gang-infested parts of Santa Martina. In addition to this problem, Sammy's nemesis, Heather Acosta, is pulling her usual nasty tricks while at home trouble is brewing in the form of Mrs. Wedgewood, Sammy's grandmother's new neighbor. Sammy's search for the baby's mother rises to a frantic pace as she and Marissa risk their lives and the tournament to solve this latest case. A must for all Sammy Keyes fans, this book also stands alone and will make readers dash back to the library to read the first six.Yapha Nussbaum Mason, Brentwood Lower School, Los Angeles Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
The Sammy Keyes series keeps getting better and better. In the seventh title in the series, a frightened teen at a video arcade asks Samantha to hold a package for her. When the girl disappears, Sammy finds that she's now responsible for what's in the package--a baby! Tara Sands captures the youthful energy of the young sleuth and her best friend, Marissa, as they try to find the boy's mother while avoiding "Snake Eyes," the sociopathic gang member who is after the mom. Despite the light tone of Van Draanen's writing and Tara Sands's cheerfully cherubic performance, the book deals with hard issues--gangs, teen pregnancy, domestic abuse--and handles them with honesty. Sands maintains momentum as she shifts from Sammy and her classmates to Hispanic gang members, from the ill-tempered Officer Borsch to prying Mrs. Wedgwood. Sammy Keyes is a keeper--that is, if she survives junior high. S.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Gr. 6-9. In the first chapter, Sammy Keyes is hanging out at the mall when a desperate young woman gives her a heavy shopping bag, implores Sammy to keep it safe, and runs from a stalker. The bag contains a baby, who barfs on Sammy's shirt, pees on her hair, and won't go to sleep. Why did the baby's mother run? The seventh in this fine series continues with the same winning blend of mystery, comedy, and coming-of-age realism. Now in seventh grade, Sammy confronts murderers and gangbangers; she also fights "the junior high kind" of trouble as her vicious archenemy taunts her relentlessly and plots to get her thrown off the softball team. As sleuth, and as a student, Sammy is smart, brave, and competent, but fans will also recognize Sammy's hurt about her mother's leaving her. As Van Draanen said of the series in "Mysteries for Children" [BKL My 1 01], "the heart of the story is her growing up." Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Sammy’s softball team is in contention for the Junior Slugger’s Cup, and all she wants to do is hunker down behind home plate and catch strikes. But Heather Acosta brings new meaning to the term “foul ball” as she schemes to get Sammy kicked off the team. And Sammy is thrown a wild pitch by a frantic girl in the mall. She begs Sammy to watch something for her and then dashes off before Sammy realizes that the bag she’s left holding contains a baby! Now there are some pitches that you shouldn’t even try to catch, but Sammy’s a take-it-in-the-chest-protector kind of player. So when the girl doesn’t return for her baby, Sammy decides to go find her. And her search leads her into situations that are just not covered in a softball playbook.
Card catalog description
When thirteen-year-old Sammy finds herself with an abandoned baby on her hands, she sets out to find the young mother, who may belong to a gang, and accidentally jeopardizes her position on the softball team.
From the Inside Flap
Sammy’s softball team is in contention for the Junior Slugger’s Cup, and all she wants to do is hunker down behind home plate and catch strikes. But Heather Acosta brings new meaning to the term “foul ball” as she schemes to get Sammy kicked off the team. And Sammy is thrown a wild pitch by a frantic girl in the mall. She begs Sammy to watch something for her and then dashes off before Sammy realizes that the bag she’s left holding contains a baby! Now there are some pitches that you shouldn’t even try to catch, but Sammy’s a take-it-in-the-chest-protector kind of player. So when the girl doesn’t return for her baby, Sammy decides to go find her. And her search leads her into situations that are just not covered in a softball playbook.
About the Author
Books have always been a part of Wendelin Van Draanen’s life. Her mother taught her to read at an early age, and she has fond memories of story time with her father, when she and her brothers would cuddle up around him and listen to him read stories.
Growing up, Van Draanen was a tomboy who loved to be outside chasing down adventure. She did not decide that she wanted to be an author until she was an adult. When she tried her hand at writing a screenplay about a family tragedy, she found the process quite cathartic and from that experience, turned to writing novels for adults. She soon stumbled upon the joys of writing for children.
Feedback from her readers is Van Draanen’s greatest reward for writing. “One girl came up to me and told me I changed her life. It doesn’t get any better than that,” she said. Van Draanen hopes to leave her readers with a sense that they have the ability to steer their own destiny—that individuality is a strength, and that where there’s a will, there’s most certainly a way.
Wendelin Van Draanen is the winner of the 1999 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Children’s Mystery Book for Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief and lives with her husband and two sons in California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
I don't generally hang out at the mall. It's full of biting shoes, shrinking clothes, and useless knickknacks. It's also crawling with poseur kids who think it's their private stage for rehearsing public coolness. Please. I get enough of that in junior high.
But the Santa Martina mall also has a video arcade, and if you know anything about my best friend, Marissa, you know that video games are the only thing that'll make her quit talking about softball. And since we're in the middle of gearing up for the Junior Sluggers' Cup tournament, softball is all Marissa's had on her mind. For weeks. She's working up plays, she's practicing after practice, she's even talked Coach Rothhammer out of her home phone number so she can run ideas by her in the middle of the night. You have to know Ms. Rothhammer to understand the significance of this--nobody's got her number, and I mean nobody. She teaches P.E. and eighth-grade science, and she's got a reputation for being really strict and really private. Like, is she married? We don't know. Does she have kids? Dogs? Horses? Flower beds? Nobody knows. I'll bet Vice Principal Caan doesn't even know, that's how good she is at being private.
What I do know about Ms. Rothhammer is that she's the one person who wants to bring home the Junior Sluggers' Cup as much as Marissa does. Probably for different reasons--like, I know Ms. Rothhammer couldn't care less about us winning the school a party day. More likely it has to do with showing up Mr. Vince, who told her she'd never get her hands on the cup. Of course, that was last November, after our team beat his team in our school's playoffs, so maybe she's forgotten all about that.
Then again, maybe not.
Anyway, the point is, Marissa McKenze has been the Softball Czar for weeks, and the past few days it's been driving me batty. And maybe I should've just said, "Marissa, enough! There's life beyond softball!" but I do live in Santa Martina, a town where everyone from Heather Acosta, Princess Prevaricator, to Mayor Hibbs, Sultan of City Hall, is into the game. So much so that people play year-round. Rain or shine, mud or flood, people play.
So instead of telling Marissa something she'd never buy into anyhow, what I said was "Hey, you want to go to the mall and play some video games?" And since I'm never the one to suggest it, she said, "Are you kidding?" and off we went.
Now, I'm not big on playing myself. I don't have the quarters to spare. So while Marissa's seriously invested in the skill of electro-badguy annihilation, I'm more an observer than anything else. Sure, I'll play a few games just to keep her happy, but pretty much I'm a peanut gallery of one.
Good as she is, though, I get bored and wind up looking around at other stuff. People, mostly. And let me tell you, there are some pretty strange people in the arcade. I'm not talking about the kids, either. They just strut around, cussing and stuff, acting like they'll take you down if you look at them wrong. Like they could actually catch you with the way they wear their pants halfway down their butts.
No, the adults are strange. It's men, mostly, and mostly they look the same--scraggly hair, faded band T-shirts, dirty jeans, and work boots. They come in alone, park themselves at the gun games, and shoot. They don't look at anyone or anything else, they just shoot. And good luck cutting in if you want a turn. I've seen kids try it, and let me tell you, it's dangerous.
Anyway, there I was, at four in the afternoon, surrounded by the noise of electro-fire, checking out the arcade clientele, when this girl with a big red-and-white Sears bag backs right into me. Hard.
Does she say, Sorry? Or, Excuse me? Or even turn around and look at me?
No.
She whimpers, "Jesus! Oh, Jesus!" and drags that bag in close, between her feet. Her eyes are glued to the arcade entrance, and she's shaking. First it's just sort of a shiver, then a rumble; then she starts having her very own internal earthquake.
"What's the matter?" I ask her, but she still doesn't turn around to look at me. She just paws through her Sears bag and rearranges a yellow towel that's on top, then weaves the bag's cord handles together, shaking the whole time.
I look between the two video games we're standing in front of so I can get a clear shot of the entrance, but all I see is a bunch of people milling around outside.
This girl is melting down about something, though, so I say to her, "Are you all right?"
"No! Oh Jesus, no!" She turns to me, her eyes full of terror. "What am I going to do? He'll kill me! He'll kill us both!"
"Who?" And I'm thinking, Whoa, now! Why would he want to kill me?
She doesn't answer. She just stays behind cover while she checks out the entrance.
"Do you want me to call the police?"
"No!" She turns back to me, looking even more scared than she had before. "No!"
"But--"
"Whatever you do..." Her shaking goes up a notch. "Oh Jesus, there he is!"
"Where?"
"Right over there!" she says, looking out into the halls of the mall. Only there are about thirty people roaming around out there. "Oh Jesus, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?"
"If you're that scared, why don't you let me call the police?"
She whirls around and says, "No! You hear me! They mess everything up. They put him away and now he's out! He's gonna kill me!"
"But if he's going to kill you..."
"Oh Jesus, here he comes." She looks around frantically. "Is there a back door to this place?"
I shake my head.
"How am I going to get out of here?" She goes back to looking outside, practically shaking herself to death.
Then I see him. I can just tell. It's the way he's walking. Slow, but, I don't know...tight. Like every step is for a reason and nothing better get in his way.
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