read this when it hit the shelves in the early nineties and remembered loving it. Even gave my copy to my sister-in-law to read (and, evidently, misplaced in Horder’s Hell). Alas.

So, Jumper is about a young boy whose father is extremely abusive. Having chased off his mother (more like her fleeing for her life), his father turns his rage on the boy, often beating him with a belt with a rodeo buckle on it. And one night, because he’s drunk, hates himself, hates his life, for whatever reason, he turns his rage (and belt) on his son again. David (our hero) screams, closes his eyes, begs, and…

Jumps.

Suddenly he’s in his safe space, the local library. Weird. And he slowly comes to terms with the fact that he is a teleport.

So, the first real cool part of this book is David trying to figure out how his power works. The only hint I’ll give is that he can only teleport to places he knows, so no blind jumping. And that’s part of the fun of the thing, learning how it works. This leads to the second cool part of the book – what can he really do with it? Since he can casually go to places he knows, he can jump as easily as we pass through a door. If he’s waiting for a bus, he can hop back to his apartment to stay warm. It’s just fun exploratory reading, figuring out what David can do with his powers and the imaginative concepts he comes up with it.

One of his first missions is to find his mom. And that goes off, reasonably well. It was interesting that writer Stephen Gould actually seemed to do his research on the subject of abuse. David’s mother is in Al-Anon, and urges David to go. And even though he tries not to, you can can clearly see how his father’s rage has infected him, making his quick to anger, to lash out, to seek revenge.

Yeah, I’ll admit that I found it a bit tedious but then again, that’s writing kids with problems. I had to write about a thirteen year old Phoenician girl with misunderstandings about sex. It’s part of the storytelling – sometimes heroes are flawed. It made the book (and our character David) interesting in his broken way.

Anyway, loved it then. Loved it now. Recommending it to you.

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