Review: Countdown

Title: Countdown

Author: Deborah Wiles

Publisher: Scholastic

Pages: 377

Series: Sixties Trilogy #1

Rating: 4.5 stars

From the book jacket:

A time that changed the world. A time that changed Franny’s life.

Franny Chapman just wants some peace. But that’s hard to get when her best friend is feuding with her, her sister has disappeared, and her uncle is fighting an old war in his head. Her saintly younger brother is no help, and the cute boy across the street only complicates things. Worst of all, everyone is walking around just waiting for a bomb to fall.

It’s 1962, and it seems that the whole country is living in fear. When President Kennedy goes on television to say that Russia is sending nuclear missiles to Cuba, it only gets worse. Franny doesn’t know how to deal with what’s going on in the world – no more than she knows how to deal with what’s going on with her family and friends. But somehow she’s got to make it through.

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Countdown is a little outside the genres I usually read – it’s historical middle-grade, rather than contemporary/paranormal YA – but I loved it. Franny, who is eleven years old, is a wonderful narrator: the perfect blend of humor and seriousness, completely believable, and Deborah Wiles captured the voice of a child perfectly. The other characters are just as good: Franny’s parents, her brother and sister and crazy uncle, her friends, the boy across the street…this could very easily be a totally true story.

It gets even easier to believe when you consider the documentary part of the novel. The whole book is full of actual footage from the 1960s – photographs, quotes, ads, political cartoons, reminders to stay safe in the bomb shelters if the air raid siren goes off…it’s all there, in between chapters. Seriously the coolest way to set up a historical book that I have ever seen. The book would be worth reading just for that. But there’s more to it than that.

The story is great too. Reading about an eleven-year-old protagonist was kind of different for me, but Franny is great and the story is amazing. I think it’s easy to forget that while the Cold War was going on, life was still going on like normal – for those of us who have never lived through something like that, it’s just history book stuff. Countdown takes those events that we read about in history class and makes them real, which is really awesome. Historical events aren’t the focus of this novel; they’re the setting. The story is about Franny and how she comes to terms with what it means to be afraid and, more importantly, what it means to be a friend.

Countdown is such a sweet, fun, and interesting book. I know those aren’t particularly original adjectives, but they certainly apply. It’s also very much a stay-up-until-you-finish-it kind of book. Definitely, definitely read it if you get the chance!