Seek

Rob Radkovitz, a high-school senior, is assigned to write his autobiography. He decides to "listen" back on his life and hears his grandmother's mystery novels, Mexican soap operas, shortwave announcers, his multilingual mother, and his rabble-rousing grandfather. Most cherished of all, he hears the voice of his absent DJ father, from a single tape of one of his radio shows. We follow Rob's search for his father from grammar school on, a man he's heard but never seen. It's a quest pursued not through San Francisco's streets but through the labyrinth of the airwaves, amid the chatter of baseball announcers, late-night DJs, and the thrillingly distant world of shortwave. Psychic readers, pirate DJs, friends, and teachers join Rob's family in an aural collage that's as joyfully comic as it is compelling. Seek is a hymn to the mystery of voices and the crucible of family. It can be easily staged as readers theatre or as a radio broadcast. Based on Paul Fleischman's book which, among its accolades, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year.