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Signal, by Cynthia DeFelice
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One day while running on the trail near his house in upstate New York, Owen McGuire meets a girl with startling green eyes and bloody cuts all over her body who seems to be utterly alone. Her name is Campion, after the wildflower that is an alien species in the area―alien meaning "from someplace else"―and Campion claims to come from someplace else entirely, a planet called Home. She plans to signal her parents to come pick her up in their spaceship. Owen agrees to help, and as he does, he feels happier than he has in a long time: His mother died a year and a half ago, and now he and his workaholic father live together like two planets on separate orbits, in a new house far from his friends. What will he do when Campion asks him to come with her into outer space, away from his lonely life on Earth?
- Sales Rank: #433116 in Books
- Brand: Square Fish
- Published on: 2011-02-01
- Released on: 2011-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.67" h x .53" w x 5.47" l, .30 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 176 pages
- Great product!
Review
“A beautifully written story of friendship, loyalty, and trust.” ―School Library Journal, Starred Review
“DeFelice, as always, infuses her mystery story with heart and grounds it in details, so Owen, the natural setting, and (most of all) his companionable dog come to life.” ―The Horn Book
“Owen's likable voice, the plot's quick pace and the science fiction overtones make this a winner.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Owen's loneliness, his lingering feelings of loss over his dead mother and his relationship (or lack thereof) with his father are so realistically delineated.” ―Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Cynthia DeFelice is the author of many bestselling books for young readers, including The Ghost of Fossil Glen, Wild Life, The Missing Manatee, and Weasel. Her books have been nominated for an Edgar Allen Poe Award and listed as American Library Association Notable Children's Books and Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year, among numerous other honors. She lives in upstate New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
“If I were an animal, what kind would I be? Well, that’s a really interesting question, Josie. I have a lot of favorites. Obviously, no animal is nobler than the dog.”
Josie, who is running ahead of me, glances back and gives me a knowing look.
“But I think I’d be a falcon. They can dive at speeds up to two hundred miles an hour. How cool would that be? Falcons fly and hunt wherever they please. They rule the sky.”
Josie gives a yip and takes off after a squirrel. Okay, I admit it, Josie’s my dog. I’m talking to my dog. Maybe it’s pathetic, but I don’t have anyone else to talk to.
And Josie’s terrific company, let me make that clear. I have great respect for dogs in general and Josie in particular. We got her when I was five, and she’s always been my best friend. Since we moved here when school ended in June, she’s my only friend.
Here is upstate New York, in what everybody calls the Finger Lakes region. That’s because there are eleven long, narrow lakes that look like skinny fingers. Most of them have Iroquois Indian names, like Seneca, Canandaigua, Keuka, and Cayuga. I can’t remember them all.
The lakes were made by glaciers during the Ice Age, but there’s an Iroquois legend that says they were formed when the Great Spirit reached down and pressed his hands into the earth. Which is kind of cool to think about, except I can’t help wondering if there’s another legend that explains why the Great Spirit had eleven fingers.
I like to picture those giant hands reaching down from the sky. In my mind, they’re always hairy, with five fingers on one hand and six on the other.
Anyway, I’m not saying I was Mr. Popularity at my old school, but I had buddies. I miss Kevin Bowen the most. He and I did practically everything together. We were known as “Owen and Bowen.” I’m Owen, obviously. Owen McGuire.
Take it from me, you don’t want to move at the end of the school year. Because then there you are in a new place where you don’t know anybody, and you’ve got the whole summer ahead of you.
We only moved a few hours away, but it feels really different here. In Buffalo, our house was in a neighborhood with a lot of kids. But now we live in what you’d have to call the boonies. There’s Seneca Lake to the east, the highway to the west, and everywhere else, nothing but woods and farm fields. I like living in the country and seeing all the deer and turkeys and woodchucks, but it would be nice to see some people, too. Especially another twelve-year-old kid.
When we first got here at the end of June, I rode around on my bike to check things out. That’s when I discovered the trail I’m running on now. It’s seven miles long, and follows the path of a stream that runs between our lake, Seneca, and Keuka Lake. The stream has cut steep cliffs through the woods, and it’s cool and shady down there. That makes it a perfect place for running, which I’m doing every day. The school I’ll be going to in the fall has a soccer team for grades seven and eight, and I plan to be on it. I decided I might as well use this long summer on my own to get in shape and practice my footwork.
So Josie and I have been running every day for three and a half weeks, going about three miles up the trail and three miles back, sometimes even more. We’ve seen a lot of amazing stuff. Like one day Josie came toward me howling like a crazy thing, chasing a wild turkey. It flew down the trail right at me, madly flapping its wings, and just missed the top of my head. I could feel the rush of air from its wings in my hair.
Another day a black bear was standing in the trail ahead of us. Josie and I both stopped dead in our tracks.
We looked at the bear, and the bear looked at us. I glanced down at Josie, and every hair on her body was standing out so stiffly she looked a lot bigger than her normal size.
“Easy, girl,” I murmured. She gave a funny little growl, and the bear ambled away. It didn’t seem to want anything to do with us, but we headed back the way we had come, just in case.
Then, two days ago, Josie ran ahead and started barking at something on the path. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw it was a snapping turtle as big as home plate. Josie was dancing all around it, lunging in and out, yipping with excitement.
“No, Josie!” I cried, but she didn’t stop. “Josie! If that thing clamps its jaws onto your nose, you are going to be very sorry!” I warned.
Finally, I was able to grab her collar and drag her away, but I could tell she wanted to go back there in the worst way. There are some things she’s not real smart about.
I don’t know the names of every single tree and plant and bird and animal we’ve been seeing on our runs, but I know a lot of them. When I was little, my mom gave me a set of field guides. She and Josie and I used to take long walks, and when we got home, we’d look up everything we’d seen in the books. I have guides on birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, wildflowers, rocks and fossils, insects, and stars. The one on stars and planets is my favorite. It was Mom’s, too.
It was Mom who really taught me to notice things. So I keep my eyes open on my runs with Josie. I recognize the teeny heart-shaped tracks of fawns and the handlike prints of raccoons. By now I know the squawk of the great blue heron that we scare out of its favorite minnow-hunting spot, and the musky smell foxes leave behind. I like to look for trout and suckers in the pools of the stream, and Josie keys me in to every squirrel, rabbit, and woodchuck we pass by.
When you’re running along through all that nature, it’s easy to see how everything belongs. Every animal and plant has its place in the big picture. So things that don’t belong really stand out, like a soda bottle, or candy bar wrapper, or a deflated Mylar party balloon. It ticks me off that people throw stuff like that around, and I’ve made it my mission to pick up trash I see and carry it out if I can.
Up ahead, I see something white lying off the path near a patch of raspberry bushes. Josie goes over to it, sniffs, then picks it up and runs along with it in her mouth.
“Josie, come!” I shout. She’s always finding stinky dead animals and scraps of food people have left behind, stuff she thinks is wonderful. This looks like a paper towel or a napkin, maybe. At least it doesn’t look like anything too disgusting, not that that would have stopped Josie.
She comes and I say, “Sit, Josie. Drop it.” Josie is a German shorthaired pointer, a hunting dog, so she’s supposed to surrender whatever she retrieves to me, her owner, the mighty hunter.
Amazingly, she sits at my first command and drops what I see now is a piece of white cloth.
“Good dog!”
There’s red stuff on it. I start to pick it up, wondering what the red is. Paint?
Whoa. Gross. Quickly, I throw it back to the ground. The red stuff is, I’m pretty sure, blood. The cloth is soft and stretchy, and has a ragged edge. It looks like it was torn off the bottom of somebody’s T-shirt.
Yuck. I’m not carrying that out, never mind my good intentions about trash removal.
I start running again. Being on the trail makes me think of all the outdoor things Mom and I used to do together. I remember a clear winter night when I was eight years old. Dad was working late. Mom got me all bundled up in my snowsuit and hat and mittens and boots, and we went outside and lay down on our backs in the snow and stared up at the sky. I barely even felt the cold because I was really noticing for the first time how enormous the sky is.
Mom told me how far away the stars are and I couldn’t believe it. I asked, “Where does it end?” Mom said she didn’t know. I kept trying to picture where the universe stopped, but I couldn’t do it. You can’t picture nothing, because as soon as you do, it’s something.
Then Mom said, “There are eight hundred thousand galaxies and billions of stars and planets out there. I like to imagine that one of them is the sun in a solar system similar to ours.”
I liked imagining it, too.
When we finally got cold and went inside, we read in the field guide to stars and planets that the number of stars is so huge that “the statistical possibility of other solar systems definitely exists.” I memorized that sentence. The book also said that telescopes have shown that there are millions of galaxies beyond ours.
Mom said, “Nobody knows exactly what happened to create the Earth’s solar system, Owen. But I don’t see any reason to think it happened only once. It’s such a small view of things, don’t you agree?”
I did. I certainly didn’t want to be the kind of person who had a small view of things. To me, it was logical to think there would be life beyond our one little planet. Actually, it seemed crazy to think there wouldn’t be.
After that night, I read everything I could about space, spaceships, space travel, people’s accounts of their encounters with aliens, you name it. I became convinced that not only is there life on other planets, but that they’ve been trying to contact us. Mom thought so, too.
Thinking about Mom is making me miss her, so I take a pretend head shot and resume my conversation with Josie. “Yes, Josie, you’re right. I learned all my cool soccer moves from Dad. You know the goal we have set up in the yard where we practice taking shots after dinner? I’m getting pretty good, don’t you think? I can’t wait for our trip to Alaska in August. Yeah, you can come, too. Didn’t we take you along when we camped in the Rockies and went fishing in the Everglades?”
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A great read!
By amysoz
Owen McGuire has had a rough year. His mom died, then his dad moved them to the middle of nowhere, away from his friends. To make it worse all his dad seems to care about these days is work, and Owen is left alone most of the time. Luckily he has his best friend, Josie, his dog, to keep him company. One day Owen and Josie discover a bloody t-shirt while out on a bike ride. Turns out the shirt belongs to Campion, and she is biding her time, waiting for her parent's spaceship to return to Earth and take her back to her home planet. Owen believes her story because of conversations he had with his mother about life on other planets, and he has a tough decision to make when Campion offers him the chance to come on the spaceship with her back to her home planet. While he is deciding he and Campion construct crop circles as a signal for her parents to know their location.
I really enjoyed this book. It was a quick read but dealt with very tough subjects in a compassionate and honest way. I liked watching Owen grow as he was faced with a difficult decision that helped him deal with the emotions he had been facing since his mother's death. It really forces the reader to put themselves in Owen's place and think about what they would do if given the choice Owen has been given.
This would be a great book pick for reluctant readers. It's fast pace, plot, and theme would appeal to middle school readers who might feel like they are alone and wonder how their life might be different if they were given a choice to do something different and extraordinary.
If you want to know what Owen end up deciding to do, pick up this book today! You won't be disappointed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Character Driven Story
By Mel Odom
Cynthia DeFelice's book, Weasel, is one of my all-time favorites. I've read it to each one of my five kids. The author has a wonderful knack for creating memorable characters, and she does it again in Signal. Owen McGuire, son of a single-parent household and a father he just can't connect with, or even find much time to share with, is immediately a sympathetic individual.
Told in first-person, the book progresses nicely, introducing Owen, his dog, and his life in a new town where he just doesn't fit in. I enjoyed the description of the town. DeFelice has great skill at making a setting be an important part of a story, and of finding the best parts of that background to show at the best times. With the way the town is, the reader never forgets how alone Owen is.
Things change dramatically when Owen finds Campion. She's obviously been injured, though she doesn't tell him what happened to her, and she's hungry. Owen shares his food, then starts taking care of the strange girl. Readers can immediately see the bond that shapes up between Owen and Campion, and I thought that progression of the relationship was well done.
The menace materializes soon after, but it doesn't really manifest as much as I'd thought it might. I was a little disappointed in this, though the climax at the end of the book was suspenseful.
One thing that bothered me was how heavily the plot revolved around Campion being from another world. I thought it was inventive, but almost distracting in the end. Ultimately the story was all about Campion and Owen both realizing what they already had at home, and with each other.
The book is easy to read and touches on a lot of relationship aspects and ideas of individual worth, so young readers will enjoy it well enough. However, it does take time to get to some of the action, so some patience will be required.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Great Novel for Young Adult Readers
By anahale
I picked up Signal on a whim, and I'm glad I did! It is a short novel - the perfect size for a reader who is not yet comfortable with longer books. As a reading teacher, this is a great book for students in grades 4-8. The characters are easy to identify with allowing the reader to connect to the text immediately. Although the book is predictable for adult readers or young accomplished readers, it is ideal for students who are just learning to make predictions in reading (because most of their predictions will be accurate).
The nitty-gritty of the story is a tale of a father-son relationship that is somewhat dysfunctional as they grieve a terrible loss. The protagonist, Owen, comes across a girl in need of help. Cam, trying to reach her home (on another planet), convinces Owen to help her. Over the course of a few days, Owen and Cam become friends and help each other.
It is a touching story about compassion and friendship. I highly recommend it!
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