Rating: 2 stars

Rotters is a true riches to rags story—or at least middle class to destitute. Joey Crouch lost his mother to a city bus and finds himself thrown into the life of a Dickens character.

Shipped off to a small Iowa town, to live with a father he never met, Joey must finish out his high-school career living in a filthy, three room cabin with a father who lives an off-the-grid lifestyle that barely has running water, much less any creature comforts—including food.

Arriving into town, Joey’s father fails to meet him at the bus station; instead, Joey is given a note by the attendant that contains directions. After walking for several hours, Joey finds the house and within minutes of arriving, his father leaves—for three days. With no food, school books or bed, Joey clears a space in the detritus to sleep on his duffel bags.

Running late on his first day, Joey sprints the mile and a half to school and the dirty, sweaty, smelly mess that he presents as doesn’t make a good first impression. Joey’s state of disarray, coupled with his father’s bad reputation as “The Garbage Man” and his continued inability to wash his clothes earns him the nickname “Crotch” and the least coveted position of being “that kid” whom always gets picked on.

When Joey’s father finally does come home, Joey’s life doesn’t get much better. It’s not long before he realizes that the deplorable conditions and the putrid smells emanating throughout the cabin are the result of his father’s employment—as a grave robber.

In the beginning, Rotters was the book The Monstrumologist should’ve been. However, after a while the plot goes flat and increasingly frustrating, as each day Joey is beat up at school and comes home to the filthy cabin to do his homework; only to have his father bury it in an effort to teach him how to dig correctly. Digging up his homework each morning only serves to make Joey’s school life even more tortuous as now he not only smells, but is filthy too.

Despite Daniel Kraus’s stylistic prose, the further into Rotters I got, the less motivated I was to keep going. The slow, often uneventful pace of the story line made it difficult to stay focused. Neither terrifying nor epic, Rotters comes up short.
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Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 464 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers (April 5, 2011)
ISBN-13: 978-0385738576