Making Up Megaboy

This book asks readers to piece together their own interpretation of the events presented here, and it will hold them breathless long past the last page: On his 13th birthday, with his father's gun, Robbie Jones shot Jae Koh, who had, for eight months, operated the Main Street Liquor Store in Santa Rosita, Calif. These are the facts as revealed by Robbie's mother, Louise Jones, and a Channel Two Newsroom reporter in the first two spreads of this deceptively slender volume. Eighteen people in all give their points of view concerning the event; no one has answers--not Robbie's mother, father, teacher, principal, preacher or even his best friend. Instead, readers experience the first-person accounts as they would a series of television or newspaper interviews; each character has a distinctive voice, reflected typographically in a unique font and coupled with Roeckelein's dramatic visuals. In one spread, Louise Jones says of her son, ""When he was little, I would read him Bible stories and fairy tales and make him pancakes in shapes like bears and elephants. It was easier to make him happy then""; opposite are photos of a happy baby boy with his teddy bear, Robbie as a boy of perhaps five, holding a turtle, and other snapshots of an older, more pensive boy--could those hold clues? Or perhaps the comic-strip adventures of a mythical Megaboy that Robbie created are the key. Readers will find themselves poring over the pages, looking for some glimmer of a foreshadowing of this dark event. But perhaps the greatest shadow lurking here is that no one really knew this child. Ages 11-up. (Apr.)