Car Trouble
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Duff Pringle has bought his first car. (Used.) He's got six days to drive 3,000 miles cross-country to California and start a new hi-tech job that will make him wealthy. (Sort of.) Nothing can stop him. (Or can it?)
Uh-oh . . . CAR TROUBLE.
Duff's Ford Escort barely makes it a hundred miles from home before breaking down. What's he supposed to do? He's promised his new boss he'll be there by Monday. But he's also promised himself that he'll make this journey by car, so he can really see the country. Using his laptop and some quick thinking, he pieces together a way to continue his trip. What he doesn't plan on are the people he meets along the road. There's Stu, a hitchhiker with a secret; Bonnie, an aspiring singer with a con artist for a mother; two thugs looking for a trunkful of cash; and Moony, the terrier prone to carsickness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like the '49ers before him, 17-year-old Duff Pringle leaves his East Coast home to seek his fortune in California. Obsessed with computer programming, he's been hired, sight unseen, by a Silicon Valley start-up. His $625 car doesn't even make it to the state line. He quickly finds new wheels by checking Internet chatboards and discovering a "drivers wanted" ad, but against his mother's explicit warning, he picks up a hitchhiker, who everyone but Duff will immediately recognize as Trouble. Along the way, Duff loses his wallet, the company folds, and he nearly loses his life when it turns out the car he's agreed to drive contains a cache of loot. He also finds a new technological obsession-alternative fuels. DuPrau (City of Ember) is a smooth writer but Duff's story, like his car, has momentum problems. A self-described geek, Duff is a "slave to shyness," and "tortured by fear"; he's afraid of things as seemingly simple as talking to a girl his age. While this may be an authentic portrayal of a teen computer whiz, unfortunately it doesn't make for a very engaging point of view and the story's moral is "listen to your parents." Ages 12-up.
