Lizard People

Charlie Price

A Deborah Brodie Book

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YOU MEET THE NICEST PEOPLE IN THE LOBBY OF A PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL.  The author of Dead Connection proves that what goes on in our minds just may be the scariest thing of all.
 
Ben Mander's junior year is derailed when his mentally ill mother erupts in the school office.  Visiting her in the psych hospital, Ben meets Marco, who also has a mentally ill mother.  Marco tells a story that turns Ben's idea of reality upside down.  Soon, the story begins to uncomfortably mirror Ben's own life.  Lizard People races along the edge of madness as Ben wrestles with his greatest fear--that deep within him lie the seeds of his own insanity.

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Praise for Lizard People

School Library Journal
 
Gr 9 Up–Ben Mander’s mother can’t or won’t take medication to control her mental illness, and his father has left home and will no longer help. The teen does his best to cope, but when his mother makes a scene in the school office and has to be physically removed, Ben is not sure how he will continue. While she is being admitted to the psychiatric unit, yet again, he meets Marco, who says that his mother is also there. Through a series of meetings, Marco tells a fantastic story of traveling through a wormhole to the year 4000 where he meets Lizard People, much like the ones that frighten Mrs. Mander in her delusional states. Unsure of what to believe, Ben goes back and forth trying to maintain his own reality in spite of overwhelming odds. In the end, all problems do not miraculously disappear, but the troubled teen gets the help he needs. Price writes honestly and with compassion about a number of issues: living with a parent who has a mental illness, the fear of inheriting this affliction, hoping for a cure, and the lack of support available for families. Characters are believable, and the plot, alternating between reality and the future land of the lizards, moves quickly and contains enough mystery to keep readers involved.–Wendy Smith-D’Arezzo, Loyola College, Baltimore, MD
 
Publishers Weekly
 
Readers who enjoy a novel with a subversive streak will relish the gamesmanship in this idiosyncratic, genre-hopping story from the author of Dead Connection. As the novel begins, Ben Mander, a junior, rushes into the high school office, where his psychotic mother, in the middle of a loud, delusional episode, is attacking a secretary: “She... is a Lizard!” All but abandoned by his father, Ben feels a kinship with Marco, a youth he meets in the lobby of the psychiatric hospital as both wait for their mothers to be admitted. Price takes care with the details—the father's slow backing away, the social workers and their limits, hospital and insurance policies—and he slowly builds a sense of Ben's growing isolation and immersion in adult problems. Meanwhile, Ben meets Marco again, and becomes engrossed in the stories Marco tells, about a future 2,000 years away that offers hope for people like Ben's mother—but that also overlaps, to an alarming degree, with the substance of Ben's mother's delusions. The pace quickens and the plot grows increasingly complex as the author blurs (for readers as well as for Ben) the distinctions between Ben's experiences and his expectations that they are valid, that he has not crossed over into his mother's illness. Raising questions about time travel and using extremes of mental health, Price's story taps into classic teenage feelings of alienation and gives them an original exploration. Ages 12-up. (Aug.)

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About the Author

Charlie Price

Charlie Price's debut novel, Dead Connection, is a Book Sense Children's Pick, a Publishers Weekly "Flying Starts" selection, and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.  Publishers Weekly praised it as "superb and compulsively readable" in a starred review.  He lives in northern California.

Charlie Price

Charlie Price

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Available Formats and Book Details

Lizard People
Charlie Price

Hardcover

Hardcover
Roaring Brook Press
A Deborah Brodie Book
August 2007
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781596431904
ISBN10: 1596431903
Young Adult Fiction
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 192 pages
Age Range: 12 and up
Grade Range: 7 and up
$16.95
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