LS 5623 Advanced Literature for Young Adults

Cooney, Caroline. 1997. The Terrorist. Scholastic Inc: New York.
ISBN 0590228544

Laura Williams' brother Billy was always friendly. He was an active eleven year old boy who collected everything and who had learned to make a profit selling American snacks to the other American kids at their school in London. Everyone knew and liked him. As he was leaving the tube station for school one morning, a stranger handed him a package. As Billy came to realize that he held a bomb in his hands, his last action in life was to shield the bomb with his body to save the woman in front of him with a baby from dying. Laura Williams wants answers. She is determined that someone picked Billy to hand the package to and that his death was not meaningless and random. And she thinks that someone goes to her school.

Americans don't like to think that they are so naive about the world, but the truth is that while most American kids could find countries like Israel and Afganistan on a map, they couldn't tell you much else about them. One of the things that struck me about Laura's character is that she's just like every other American teen. She's more concerned with having a date to the next dance than with current world politics. Laura however attends the London International Academy, where many of the students ride to school in bulletproof limos and would be arrested and executed if they ever set foot in their home country. Students at this school have to learn to not ask about backgrounds if they want to make friends or risk starting a mini culture war. Reading about Laura trying to navigate this environment, especially once she begins looking for her brother's murderer among her friends, makes one want to cringe. I felt both embarrassed that an American girl didn't know the political world and yet I related to her because I can't honestly say I know it myself.

The mystery of this story is of course, who planned for Billy to be killed and was it a random act of violence. The reader begins to wonder if Laura is simply mad with grief when she begins to interrogate all of her friends and seems to see terrorists everywhere she looks. Ironically, in keeping her eyes peeled for suspects, she dismisses an important one off hand and only comes to realize later who Billy's killer is. I think the mystery of Billy's killer is easily solved by the reader once the killer begins to move with her plan, but Cooney does a great job of keeping the action fast paced and interesting to carry the reader to the end of the book.

Lastly, the ending is a true ending where not everything ends happily or the way we'd like. Billy's killer is judged as a minor and placed in a foster home, where she runs away from not long after. There is no real justice for Billy. And in the real world, people sometimes have to accept that. Life is not always fair.

1997 School Library Journal, "Gripping from the very start, the narrative becomes nearly impossible to put down as it races to its nail-biting though slightly far-fetched climax."




Image taken from: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/c/caroline-b-cooney/terrorist.htm