On the surface, Jed Jenkins seems like a pretty normal twelve-year-old kid. He’s certainly not the kind of guy who would stand out in a crowd. Average. Typical. Nothing extraordinary.
Except that for as long as he can remember, Jed’s parents have been challenging him in unusual ways. Take, for example, the day before his twelfth birthday. Jed’s mother drops him off in the middle of Yellowstone National Park—with $4, an orange soda, a kiss, and a reminder to be home by dinnertime the following day, or else his dad will eat the best part of his birthday cake. Most kids would find this alarming. But for Jed, the abandonment is little more than a mild annoyance. Less than 12 hours later, he’s back on the doorstep of his Denver home. There’s joking and laughter and hugs and cake, and when Jed finally crawls into bed that night, everything is as it should be. Normal. Nothing extraordinary.
But when he wakes up the next morning, everything has changed. His parents have disappeared, leaving behind only a note telling him that if he’s found the note, they’ve likely been kidnapped. There’s a key, a watch, and a few strange instructions, beginning with something about a junkyard accessed by a tunnel behind the dishwasher. This seems odd, even for his parents, but it wouldn’t be the first time Jed’s been faced with an odd challenge, and so he enters the world beyond the dishwasher, a world that is as far from average and typical as you can get.
The first book in a brand new series, Steven Bohls’s Jed and the Junkyard War is post-apocalyptic steampunk meets Pirates of the Caribbean. Upon arriving in the junkyard, Jed embarks on a quest to find his grandfather, his only clue to his missing parents. He finds himself aboard a flying ship, haphazardly assembled with junkyard scraps. Led by Captain Bogs and his crew, including the confident Sprocket, the ever-friendly Pobble, the suspicious Riggs, and the cynical Kizer, the ship is Jed’s only chance to find the answers he needs. But not everyone on the crew welcomes the new passenger. It’s not until a stowaway named Shay appears on board that Jed feels like he finally might get some answers. But with those answers come more questions, and with those questions comes more prying, until Jed finds himself face to face with exactly the kind of answers he doesn’t want to hear.
Fast-paced, humorous tending a bit towards the snarky, and surprising, Jed and the Junkyard War is everything you want a debut novel to be. The reader cheers for Jed, the kind of kid who has gotten out of tough situations before and so can surely get out of this one. The junkyard world, while fully imaginary, is populated with characters who somehow make it seem completely realistic, if a bit bizarre. And the ending echoes, in more ways than one, and begs the question:
When does the next book come out?
Jed and the Junkyard War is on B&N bookshelves now.
The post From Flying Ships to Turf Battles: Jed and The Junkyard War appeared first on The B&N Kids Blog.