CRUISE CONTROL
Terry Trueman
HarperTempest
Fiction
ISBN: 0066239605
160 pages

In STUCK IN NEUTRAL, Terry Trueman's 2001 award-winning novel, he developed a most unlikely narrator: Shawn, a young man whose body is incapacitated by severe cerebral palsy, but whose mind is more engaged than anyone would have imagined. Now, Trueman gives Shawn's older brother Paul a voice in the companion novel CRUISE CONTROL.

Paul is pretty much the polar opposite of Shawn: he is popular, gifted, a jock who can trust his body to perform at the highest level. He's also deeply angry, with a quick temper and a tendency to fly off the handle. Much of Paul's anger is directed at his father, a writer who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning poem about Shawn after he left the family, and now seems to use Shawn mostly for photo ops and talk show appearances. Paul, who deeply loves his brother (even though he calls him a "veg"), resents his father for abandoning him and for escaping the day-to-day realities of living with a profoundly disabled family member.

CRUISE CONTROL is sometimes a disturbing book, as when the reader is taken into Paul's head as he beats up a complete stranger, or when Paul and his equally angry friend Tim drive drunk. Although STUCK IN NEUTRAL was perhaps a more powerful book, in part because of its unusual and surprising narrator, CRUISE CONTROL is still a complex and moving portrayal, even with its more conventional main character. Although each novel can stand on its own merits, STUCK IN NEUTRAL and CRUISE CONTROL gain strength when read together, as they form a more complete portrait of a family dealing with the daily heartbreak of Shawn's disability.

   --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

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