The Squeaky Wheel - Hardcover

Robert Kimmel Smith began dreaming of becoming a writer at the age of eight, when he spent three months in bed reading while recovering from rheumatic fever. He enrolled in Brooklyn College in 1947, and served in the U.S. Army, in Germany. In 1954 he married Claire Medney, his editor and literary agent. They have two children: Heidi and Roger. After writing advertising copy, Robert Kimmel Smith became a full-time writer in 1970.

Smith hits upon a lot of truths in this novel of a boy's slow and painful adjustment to his parents' separation and impending divorce. Mark is not happy with the dramatic changes in his life, and his parents often can't give him the attention he deserves because of their preoccupations with their own problems. Subplots involve Mark's confrontation with the school psychopath and his efforts to coax a super-serious Chinese student to enjoy himself more. Some characters from Smith's earlier books move around the novel's periphery, although the tone of this book is more serious than in those works. Mark's anxiety about the divorce is accurately depicted. He often worries about little things: the loss of his bicycle, the adjustment of the move from a house to an apartment, the fact that his new school building is old and a little run-down. These are part of greater anxieties, however, that are expressed in a readable manner and with a good ear for the sentence patterns and colloquialisms of young people. By the novel's end, Mark has started to make an adjustment by relying on his own inner resources. He has grown more independent and has taken steps toward becoming an adult. Readers, meanwhile, have met an engaging character. --Todd Morning, Schaumburg Township Public Library, IL
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