Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 04/15/2020 *Starred Review* Eleven-year-old Rick is an Angeleno with two truly unusual talents: a genius for understanding traffic patterns and how to fix them and a gift for coaxing trust and friendship out of Mila, a shy, silent, artistic younger neighbor. Both come into play when Mila quietly invites him to join her in a Girl Scouts arts project—fancifully repainting old road signs to be posted around the city as street art. To Rick, frustrated by repeated fruitless efforts to contact the local department of transportation, this looks like a golden opportunity to prove the worth of his ingenious “Snarl Solutions” while also saving his parents’ Polish catering business, which is on the verge of going under due to an inability to make timely deliveries. A few forged work orders later, well-placed and amusingly altered signs have caused the hellish traffic jams on the freeway over Sepulveda Pass to disappear. But this triumph is just a warm-up for two even tougher tests. Mila’s discovery that Rick, the self-styled “Colossus of Roads,” has used her work without asking opens a rift of betrayal that seems unbridgeable. Then a major earthquake leaves Mila’s troop stranded amidst a massive tangle of blocked and impassable streets. Readers with underappreciated talents of their own will be heartened by Uss' (The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, 2018) ultimately unabashedly feel-good sophomore tale. - Copyright 2020 Booklist.

Booklist - 04/15/2020 - Copyright 2020 Booklist.