THE TERRORIST
Caroline B. Cooney
Delacorte Press
Fiction
ISBN: 0590228544
213 pages

Someone hands Billy Williams a package on his way to school. Instinctively, he knows what it is. He wraps himself around the bomb and is gone in an instant. However, he saves the lives of the mother and child next to him.

THE TERRORIST, by Caroline B. Cooney, is the story of how a family copes with the death of a child. Nicole spends hours in the kitchen staring at the cans of Spaghetti-O's she buys for her son, and Thomas, Billy's father, can't remember what town he is heading for, as he works at closing factories and taking away workers' incomes. No matter how many people try to comfort the Williams family, "Billy remained where he was. Gone."

Laura looks at her friends and classmates thinking, the killer could be any one of them. "Laura's eyes burned, dimly seeing the outline of killers where before she had had friends. Forgive Billy's killer? Laura Williams shuddered as if Billy's heart and soul had moved through her. And Laura Williams said out loud, 'Never.'" Will Laura find a clue to the killer in Billy's endless lists, or was it a random act and just chance that Billy was there to receive the package containing the bomb?

Jehran, a friend from school, surprises Laura with a strange request. She needs Billy's passport and Laura's help to escape from her brother and an arranged marriage. How involved will Laura get?

Underneath the action, suspense, and the seemingly ordinary life of an American teenager in an English school is the sorrow and the confusion that only the violent death of a son and a brother can cause in a family's life.

   --- Reviewed by Audrey Marie Danielson

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