The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza by Jack Gantos (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza by Jack Gantos Deborah Stevenson Gantos, Jack The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza. Farrar, 2014 [160p] ISBN 978-0-374-30083-8 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7 See this month’s Big Picture, p. 141, for review. It’s always bittersweet to see the finale of a beloved series, especially when it means saying goodbye to a captivating character. So it is with this fifth book featuring the irrepressible Joey Pigza (Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, BCCB 11/98, etc.), which is announced as his final title, but author Gantos has given his hero a truly satisfying, genuinely crowning valedictory. After various family upheavals, Joey is back in his old house with his mother (now split from his father) and his beloved baby brother, Carter Junior. Or at least he was living with his mother, until her depression returns and she fearfully checks herself into the hospital to protect the baby (“I don’t want to do to him what I did to you,” she heartbreakingly tells Joey). Joey dives into action (his natural state anyway) and picks up the household reins, taking care of Carter Junior at first on his own and then with the help of his friend Olivia, “the meanest blind girl in the world.” After Joey’s father shows up and makes a foiled attempt to kidnap Carter Junior, Joey, in a neat callback to the first title in the series, finds the dropped key to his father’s apartment and uses it to explore the life his father is hoping to create anew—and to face off with his father about the life he can’t leave behind. In the frenetic Joey Pigza books, Gantos remains elementary school’s answer to Hunter S. Thompson, and as usual he makes the life of a boy with a lot of problems into a pell-mell adventure without a jot of sententiousness and with a good solid heart. More than most multiple-title protagonists, Joey has genuinely changed and grown, and that trajectory is made vividly clear in the text as Joey wistfully longs for the days when he was the person with the problems, not the person solving them: “Now I had to be the mature Joey, the think-before-you-speak Joey, the better-than-Dad Joey, the hold-the-fort-for-Mom Joey, the keep-the-baby-safe Joey, the answer-man-with-a-plan Joey.” That Joey, however, is still utterly irresistible, and now he gets to be absolutely victorious as well, in a showdown with his irresponsible father that many kids will yearn to emulate (when his father commands, “Show me some respect—I’m your dad,” Joey snaps back, “Earn some”). He understands that he now has more ability to set limits than his father does, and when his dad seeks to take Carter Junior and start anew, leaving the rest of the family behind, Joey insists on family reunion or nothing: “Right now, I’m the man of the house and my rule number one for you is, no family, then no baby.” That may not be a family dynamic or solution recommended in any counseling textbook, but it’s got a realistic pragmatism about what functionality means in many households, and it does indeed restore some to Joey’s when his parents carefully, tentatively reunite. [End Page 141] Even kids whose own experience is more orthodox will recognize that this conclusion counts as success for the Pigzas and a triumphant coming into his own for Joey, the boy whose unstoppable energy has become a force for good. Fans who’ve followed Joey’s chronicles will regret the series’ ending, but the inimitable Joey will live on indelibly in memory and in new generations of readings. (See p. 154 for publication information.) Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois