Kids of Appetite by David Arnold (review)

Like his dad, Vic is a “heart-thinker,” viewing the coincidences and collisions of life with a simple, dogged optimism. His dad has even taught him to deal positively with the stares, questions, and bullying he encounters because of his Moebius syndrome, a partial facial paralysis that prevents him from showing his feelings. After his father dies, Vic takes the urn with his father’s ashes to release them into the river, but instead he meets Madeline, the second narrator of this story that unfolds in flashback under police interrogation. Vic joins a group of homeless teens that includes Mad, two orphaned Congolese boys, and a sassy eleven-year-old. The elder Congolese boy, Baz, has been arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, and Vic and Mad are trying to stall the police long enough for the others to get away. What begins as an attempt to fulfill Vic’s dad’s wishes to dispose of his ashes, turns into a love story between Mad and Vic, and readers may fall similarly for the whole group of kids, who have all escaped harrowing situations to find one another. The accounts related by both teens are luminous and deeply affecting in their details of Vic’s parents’ courtship, Mad’s plans to take her grandmother away from her abusive uncle, and Baz’s quest to help people. Beautifully written with compelling voices, evocative allusions and metaphors, and pithy aphorisms, this offers the sentimental cleansing (the kind that comes with tears) that books do best, admirably living up to Mad’s own favorite book, The Outsiders, in its path through tragedy to blessing.