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In Times Past
an eBook on CD
by Carol Hurst and Rebecca Otis

Integrating US History with Literature in Grades 3-8.

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I Am the Cheese

by Robert Cormier. (HarperCollins,1985 ISBN Dell,1981 ISBN 0-440-94060-5) Novel. 220 pages. Grades 5+.
This book was first reviewed by Carol Otis Hurst in Teaching K-8 Magazine.

Review

This is a frightening novel which, like many of Cormier's books, makes the reader as afraid to go forward as his main character is. We are with Adam as he rides his bike from Monument, Massachusetts toward a hospital in Vermont where his father is. Intersperced with the exhausting and sometimes frightening trip, we read excerpts from a taped interview between Adam and an enigmatic interviewer. Through these tapes, we find the horror that has existed for Adam and we learn of his eventual fate. It is also revealed, on those tapes, that Adam has been and is being heavily medicated, that his memories are full of gaps and that this interviewer, for reasons of his own, is helping him work his way through those gaps. Eventually we learn what the interviewer recommends for Adam's future. Our realization that all of this is still impersonal, that the powers-that-be can have acted so callously, is the deeper horror in the book.