Maniac Magee

Reviewed by Zach in 2007

I had to read it for SFA at school because it's a Newbery Medal book. I thought it was really good because of all the things the main character, Maniac Magee does. I like to do a lot of the same things he likes to do, like run. He’s really athletic.

The main conflict in the book was that his mom and dad died and he had to live with his uncle. His auntie and uncle hate each other but won’t get divorced because they’re Christians. So he runs away. Everybody thought he was strange because he ran everywhere and he would say hi to everyone he passed. He did all these amazing stunts that everyone thinks are so cool. Like once he ran in the middle of a high school football game and caught the ball and made a touchdown and he was so fast that no one could catch him.

He’s super good at tying knots and he’s allergic to pizza. There was a contest in the newspaper that if you untie a knot bigger than a volleyball you get a prize. He did it but the prize was pizza and he’s allergic to it so he gives it to the McNabb kids. He lives with them but they were really messy and dirty and out of control. They wouldn’t go to school. So he tells them he’ll do stunts if they went to school. He threw a rock at a telephone pole 67 time in a row. He stayed in a scary backyard for 15 minutes. All to get them to go to school.

Maniac does a lot of amazing things. When he played baseball, he hit a homerun every time. He kept getting more and more famous. My favorite part of the book was when John McNabb was playing baseball and he ran to the creek to pee real fast. He comes back with a frog and he pitches it to Maniac Magee. Maniac bunts the frog down the third base line. John McNabb had an idea to push the frog out of bounds so it would be a foul ball. But the frog kept jumping away from him and no one could catch him so Maniac made a home run with the frog.

But even though he did amazing things, he got so depressed because he doesn’t have a family so he kept running away until he found the right family, the Beals. He lives with the Beals in the East end. But the East end of town is where the blacks live. It was a book about race. One day a man came and wrote “Fish Belly go home” because he didn’t want a white boy living with the blacks. So Maniac didn’t want to cause trouble to the Beals so he ran away and started living in the deer pen in the Zoo.

I like this book a lot.