As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth

I think this is my favorite LRP book ever! Ry's summer vacation was supposed to be a train trip across the country to camp, while Mom and Dad sailed off to the Caribbean to "revitalize their marriage" and Grandpa Lloyd stayed home to take care of the house and the dogs. Except that nothing -- and I mean nothing-- goes the way it should. The train stops in the middle of nowhere to fix something, and Ry gets off to climb a nearby hill to find some cell reception and call Grandpa because he finally opened the letter from the camp director, which says there is no camp, and don't come. The train takes off without him, and he's stuck walking, with only railroad tracks to guide him. When he makes it to a town, he meets Del, who takes him in, show more and offers him a job when the Amtrak agent at the train station refuses to help him get a ticket home. Del decides to drive Ry home to Wisconsin because Grandpa hasn't answered the phone in a few days (since he went out to walk the dogs and fell and whacked his head in a brand new sinkhole), and neither have Mom and Dad (since their cell phone got stolen by a greenish monkey). Thus begins a road trip filled with an impossible number of mishaps, wrong turns, bizarre events, friends both new and old, one Willys jeep, a homemade airplane held together with duct tape, an exploding methane digester, and a sailboat named Peachy Pie. It's an adventure of epic proportions, and you never know what's coming next! Realistic fiction with lots of humor and plot twists. Even the dogs get to have a few quick chapters about their adventures off-leash! 7th grade and up. show less

Ry is on the train to summer camp when he reads the final letter from the camp director. The letter reads, in its entirety:

Dear Roy,

Do not come to camp. There is no camp. Camp is a concept that no longer exists in a real place or time.

We are so sorry. The Summer ArcheoTrails Program will not take place. A statistically improbable number of things have gone wrong and the camel’s back is broken. Your money will be fully refunded as soon as I sell my car and remortgage my house.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, blahblahblah. We hope to regroup and put together a bombproof program by next summer. Live and learn!

With deepest apologies, believe me,

(illegible scrawl)

Wally Osfeld (pgs 6-7. All quotes taken from ARC and are show more subject to change.)

This is not the last statistically improbable thing that will happen to Ry during his summer vacation – not by a long shot. Who ever would have guessed, for example, that shortly after reading this strange letter Ry would hop off the stopped train – just for a moment – to try to get cell phone reception so he can call his family, only to have the train suddenly pull away and leave him stranded in the hills with not so much as a house in sight? By the time Ry reaches civilization he has only the travel cash from his pocket, a black eye, a pocketknife, a single shoe, and a useless cell phone with very little charge and no reception. Not that the cell phone would have done him much good – his parents, who are on a vacation somewhere in the Caribbean, have lost their cell phone to a curious monkey. And his grandpa, who is house-sitting and taking care of Ry’s dogs, has hit his head during a fall and developed short-term amnesia. No one in the world knows that Ry is wandering by himself – and it might not seem like it at this moment in time, but a totally unplanned, detour-filled, almost-catastrophic road trip might be exactly what Ry needed this summer.

Some books have a charm that is just so easy. It takes a light hand and a keen sense of humor to make the reader stay invested and, well, somewhere within the realm of belief, in a book where literally everything goes wrong. And I do mean everything – Ry is in the above situation within 30 pages, and things don’t get any simpler for him. Luckily, Lynne Rae Perkins has both of those qualities in spades. Despite Ry tripping from one unbelievable situation to the next, the wry, conversational style of the narrative keeps the verging-on-silly plot from running off the rails. A notable example (and please know that I am doing my very best not to make this review just a string of random quotations – it’s a serious temptation with a book that’s so expertly narrated!): “Ry looked at his feet and legs in one of those little shoe mirrors that sat on the floor. The shoes were a metaphor for the decline of western civilization: crappy and glitzy and barely useful, but pretty comfortable. This is the narrator’s opinion. Ry didn’t think that thought specifically, but he felt as dispirited as if he had.” (Pg. 68. All quotes taken from ARC and are subject to change.) You want to crawl inside the narrator’s head right now, don’t you? I sure do.

And in the end, no matter what the plot threw my way, the absurdly delightful characters that people this novel could hold my attention in any situation. Ry is funny, sweet, and a little bit dumbfounded – as anyone would be in the situations he finds himself in. He is charming from the very beginning, and is capable of keeping his affable nature even in the worst of circumstances. And then he finally stumbles into a town, finds a stranger, and tries his best to act like this is all something that happens to ordinary people. But in what might be the single stroke of good luck that finds Ry in his journey, this total stranger is Del.

Oh, Del Del wonderful Del! Del lives, breathes, and thrives on people in unusual situations who are in need of his help. Especially if that help involves unexpected road trips, fixing things in unusual ways, danger, or unlikely odds – and Ry’s story will have all of these. Del’s the kind of guy who listens to Ry’s improbable story and says, well, since you can’t get a hold of your family I guess I’ll drive you from Montana to Wisconsin. And when that doesn’t work out as they planned, he says well, I guess I’ll just take you down to the Caribbean to find your parents. And when they end up in a car driven by a man with very little eyesight and no feeling below his knees, or in a small plane that requires some midair repairs over the ocean, Ry is able to stave off panic by looking at Del, who “seemed, as he was in any situation that required physical strength and agility plus mechanical aptitude and that also included unlikely odds, perfectly at ease” (pg. 259, All quotes taken from ARC and are subject to change.) Del is, without question, my new favorite grown-up in a YA novel, and he is the perfect companion for Ry’s bizarre summer. It is Del’s reassuring presence that makes the novel still feel comfortable and safe enough to be truly funny, even in situations that should, by all rights, be terrifying.

Now, Ry and Del’s adventure is interwoven with a few others – Ry’s parents, his grandpa, and even his dogs each have their own tale to tell. And in Perkins’ hands, their tales are also funny and sweet and worth reading. In any other context, I think I would have been delighted by these little sidestories. But I fell so completely in love with Ry and Del that I got easily annoyed by anything that took me away from them. Please don’t think of this as a genuine quibble with the book – when I make myself think of it in an objective way and not as a crazy reader with an agenda of her own, I think these detours were the best way to tell the stories of Ry’s family, and those stories are important to Ry’s journey and do a nice job of further illuminating the themes of luck and chance that the book centers around. And I think many readers will love their addition, especially the story of the dogs, which is told in short illustrated episodes.

I have not yet read anything else by Lynne Rae Perkins. I feel like an idiot now. Are her other books this wise and wonderful? Somebody get me a copy of Criss Cross, stat! show less

Enjoyed the writing, but did not agree with the choices Ry made, at all. I would have definitely stayed and looked for my grandfather in WI instead of ending up in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, one is interested in finding out how it all unravels, cute vignettes including the family dogs.

Lynne Rae Perkins’ book As Easy As Falling Off the Face of the Earth begins with a catastrophe and keeps on going. Here are the three main ones (although there are many more):

1. Ry is on his way from Wisconsin to a hiking camp. The train he is on suddenly stops in the middle of nowhere. He gets off the train (against the conductor’s warning) to make a call but his cell phone has no reception, so he starts moving further away from the train. Of course, at that point the train starts moving and he is left in the middle of nowhere.
2. Ry’s grandfather, Lloyd, is staying at Ry’s house to take care of the dogs while Ry and his parents (see item 3 below) are away. While walking the dogs, he trips and hits his head. He’s unconscious show more for a while and when he awakens, he has amnesia. In addition, the dogs have wandered off.
3. Ry’s parents are cruising the Caribbean on a dream vacation. They lose their cell phone and are basically incommunicado and know nothing of Ry’s and Lloyd’s predicaments. They also have their own problems to contend with.

The main story concerns Ry, who wanders into a nearby town and meets the town’s do-gooder, Del. Del decides to drive Ry home to Wisconsin (from Montana) and when they arrive, Lloyd is still nowhere to be found. So they then decide to find Ry’s parents in whatever island they happen to be on—an implausible strategy, in my mind.

My personal feeling is that the story of Ry and Del and the adventures they have on their road trip would have been an excellent story. The addition of Lloyd’s and Ry’s parents’ trials and tribulations just muddle the works. As I mentioned earlier, there is catastrophe after catastrophe.
If Perkins was trying to be humorous, the humor was lost on me. If she was trying to be serious, it was just too much.

Having said all that, I do like the way Perkins writes. Her use of language is excellent. You can visualize every location and every event. I like the main characters, Ry, Del and his friends, Yulia who is Del’s love interest. I like the adventures they experience, especially with Carl, the driver with alzheimers disease and cataracts, who can barely see the road, and who picks them up as they are hitchhiking. As a road trip book, without the catastrophes that Perkins uses as catalysts for the action, this could be a 4 or even 5 star book. show less

Perkins, Lynne Rae. (2010). As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth. New York: HarperCollins/Greenwillow. 368 pp. ISBN 978-0-06-187090-3 (Hard Cover); $16.99.

Ry thinks he will search for bones in Montana but his camp is cancelled. He meets up with Del, however, and his trip back home to Wisconsin becomes a sailboat adventure in the Caribbean.

Perkins is a master at forcing characters (and readers) to come full circle. Ry thinks he is in control of his life, but really it is cell phones, transportation, technology, home, and more that rules Ry. He sets out to discover dinosaurs from an inspection of digging up their buried bones and comes to realize that a whole host of fluke events have the very real possibility of dropping us off show more the face of the Earth—EASILY! Ry ends up in “control” of his life but only to the extent that he learns to really study the roots of who he is and what he wants out of life. So much goes wrong on Ry’s trip to Montana that this book also functions quite well as a simple humorous catalog of disaster. Perkins command of language—of just the right detail to describe, say, the desert is notable in and of itself. Del is particularly well drawn. I love the poetic, Song of Myself, feel to this novel that has Quality etched on each and every page. This book is best suited for high school students and strong middle school readers. show less

Completely unbelievable, trying too hard to be charming, ridiculous at every turn, and yet I still kind of liked it.

I didn't know much about this book. The description doesn't give much away. What I found in the book was a fun read about a summer gone wrong for one highly entertaining family.

Ry is supposed to be off to summer camp. He gets a note telling him not to come to camp, camp no longer exists. When he jumps off his train real quick to try to find a cell connection, the train takes off without him. His parents are no help. They are off on a Caribbean trip dealing with problems of their own. His Grandpa is back at home house sitting with the two dogs. But he has fallen and hit his head, and is now suffering from short-term amnesia. Oh yea, and the dogs ran away. So Ry is all on his own with no one to know he is missing. Luckily he meets Del. A show more different but nice man that helps Ry through all the craziness.

The story is mainly in Ry's perspective, but we also see the other three stories throughout. The dogs story was told with short illustrations, which I found amusing. Ry was a solid main character. He made you want to follow along on his crazy journey. Del was a very important character. Without him, Ry on his own would have felt more scary. But the comfort and kindness he brought kept the story fun and humorous.

The best part of the story by far was the writing style. It's wry and witty and moving all at the same time. I loved the way she puts her sentences together. Perkins made every character lovable and realistic to me. Even the dogs!

My only complaint would be getting to the ending, I grew impatient waiting for everything to come together. I wanted to see all the separate stories tie together, and that seemed to drag a bit. But that could just be me being the impatient person I am. :)

As Easy As Falling Off the Face of the Earth was an easy and enjoyable read that had me laughing out loud. A perfect lazy summer read. This is my first book from Perkins, and I will be reading more from her for sure. show less