Maniac Magee

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Maniac Magee
Author	Jerry Spinelli
Cover artist	Alyssa Morris
Language	English
Genre(s)	Young adult novel
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	184 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-316-80722-2

Maniac Magee is a novel written by widely read young adult author Jerry Spinelli. It was published in 1990 and won the Newbery Medal in 1991.

Like many of Spinelli's other books, Maniac Magee was written to entertain young readers while at the same time helping them to understand important life lessons. In Maniac Magee, the lessons primarily deal with racial and other prejudices and the importance of friends and family. The lessons are easy for children to understand and apply, making a larger impact in young minds. In addition, his story-telling occurs in the fashion of a playground gossip, positing that the reader has already heard of the famous Maniac Magee and the author is merely setting out to tell the true story of the boy. Over the course of the novel, this frame slips into an omniscient narrative, more suited to the serious events that occur.

[edit] Plot summary

12-year-old Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac" Magee is an orphan who is a homeless baseball and football superstar; he can run extremely fast on railroad tracks, and comes to soothe racial tensions in his town of Two Mills. Two Mills is divided between the black and white people by Hector Street: blacks on East End, whites on West End. The racial tensions there, are very strong. Maniac is very confused by racial biases; to him, the people are simply people, heterogeneous but having much in common, such as kindness and cruelty.

Jeffrey's parents were killed in a trolley accident when he was three; he spent the next eight years in the bizarre household of his Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan. In essence, they lived in the same house without speaking to each other, using Jeffrey as their go-between. There was two of everything in the house. At a choir concert, his aunt and uncle sit on opposite ends of a row of seats ; the performance is suddenly interrupted by Jeffrey, screaming at the top of his lungs, "talk! talk, will ya! talk! talk! talk! " Jeffrey runs out of his school's auditorium and does not stop.

After one year of running, Jeffrey arrives in Two Mills. There, he quickly befriends numerous people on both sides of the unofficial segregation. Among them are a contemporary family of his, an African-American girl named Amanda Beale, with whose family he lives for several seasons; James Down, known as "Hands", a sport player who was vastly impressed by Jeffrey's own speed, dexterity, and agility; and the Samaritan family of Valerie Pickwell. In addition, Jeffrey proceeds to outdo a gang of bullies, sit on the doorstep of a mysterious, reclusive, and notoriously ill-tempered neighbor called Finsterwald, untie Cobbles' Knot, and stand up honestly to a black boy nicknamed Mars Bar, who covers up his own fears by frightening all other children.

Later, Jeffrey is startled into the realization of his own difference from the African-Americans with whom he lives with. As a result, he flees the town and hides in the buffalo enclosure of the local zoo. The buffaloes, a mother and a calf, accept Jeffrey freely. One day, he is injured in leaping over a fence. A passing hired hand called Earl Grayson rescues the boy and offers him shelter. The two become fast friends. Jeffrey and Grayson live together through most of the winter in the equipment room of a gymnasium, creating a nearly utopian life of interdependence and mutual learning. Jeffrey learns that Grayson was once a Minor League baseball player, forced to retire after a spectacular failure that came in the wake of a sequence of victories. Grayson, in turn, learns to read, a skill he had neglected through childhood. After Christmas, Grayson dies in his sleep.

Jeffrey, heartbroken, flees to Valley Forge and there waits to die. He is prevented from dying by two runaway boys, Piper and Russell McNab, whom he bribes into going home. While they are eating at a pizza-vendor's site in Two Mills, the boys' elder brother John appears. John is an extremely tall bully who was humiliated in a baseball game by Jeffrey. For returning the younger duo, John forgives Jeffrey and takes him home. In the McNab house, Jeffrey sees gluttony, squalor, racial prejudice, sloth, and ill-feeling in many ways. He attempts to correct the status quo by bribing the youngest McNabs into good behavior and by bringing a guest to Piper's birthday party--that guest being "Mars Bar" Thompson, the East End's harshest black kid. The introduction of Mars Bar to the McNabs seems to end in disaster, but teaches Jeffrey a valuable lesson about his friend's character.

Due to struggles that result from his unique social position--that of a homeless integrator--Jeffrey leaves the McNabs and roams all over the town, sleeping where he might and running at his own great pace through the streets in the early morning. At similar times, Mars Bar also goes running; when he meets Jeffrey, they run parallel, acknowledging one another in looks but not words.

During the course of their running, they come upon the younger McNabs. Russell is in danger of being crushed by a trolley on the very same line on which Jeffrey's parents died. Jeffrey walks away without rescuing Russell, and Mars Bar rescues him instead. Because Russell will not let go of him, Mars Bar takes both children to his own house, where his mother cares for them.

Later, Jeffrey again hides in the buffalo enclosure. Mars Bar finds him there and tells him what has happened. He also asks why Jeffrey did not venture out to rescue Russell. He then invites Jeffrey to visit his family, but Jeffrey refuses.

On hearing of this refusal, Amanda Beale (who looks on Jeffrey's welfare as her own responsibility) storms into the zoo and retrieves her friend. She insists that Jeffrey become a permanent resident in her house, and Jeffrey accepts.