Review for
Dear Mr. Kapps
by Robert Ferrier

Fourteen-year-old Rafe Mackey, an aspiring comedy writer, keeps himself more or less sane and functional while undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma. His method is to write letters to a nationally known TV comic named Solomon Kapps. "When I write funny stuff, time goes warpy," says Rafe, "I loop into another world." And another world is a good place to be when you are facing your own fear and pain.

Among the other situations Rafe is dealing with are his own performance anxiety, (Do his schtick before an audience? No way.), the failing health and ultimate death of his chemo buddy BB, and the ludicrous "John Alden" situation he falls into when the most beautiful girl in his class asks him to help her football-hunk boyfriend appreciate books and incidentally pass English.

This is much, much more than a problem novel about lymphoma, It's well-written, inventive, many-layered, and genuinely funny. (She's so messy you don't visit her room, you go there with a guide.") Even though Mr. Kapps himself never answers the letters, Rafe finds his own answers through writing them. The book has a few minor flaws (such as the fact that Lea, an older teenager who has survived lymphoma, sometimes talks like a National Cancer Society pamphlet on positive thinking), but they are minor when set beside the story's genuine virtues. I laughed, I cried, I didn't want the book to end. Buy it.

~Georgess McHargues
Selected the top eBook in Young Adult category in 2001
http://www.mcquark.com.

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