Not Just for Kids: ‘No Passengers Beyond This Point’ by Gennifer Choldenko

No Passengers Beyond This Point

A Novel

Gennifer Choldenko

Dial Books for Young Readers: 244 pp., $16.99

“Foreclosure” is a word that’s gotten a lot of news coverage in recent years, paralleling, as it does, the economy’s downward spiral. It’s less common to read about financially induced home loss in fiction, especially in books for young readers.

But in the new middle-grade novel “No Passengers Beyond This Point” by Gennifer Choldenko (Newbery-winning author of “ Al Capone Does My Shirts”), foreclosure is the catalyst for a fantastical journey taken by three siblings after their single mother loses their home in Thousand Oaks.

Only one of the children saw it coming.

Twelve-year-old Finn had noticed the family no longer ate meat for dinner — just spaghetti and mac and cheese. There were a lot of calls on the answering machine from an entity called “Home Fi.” The only part of his mother’s behavior that didn’t make sense to Finn involved field trip forms that she let pile up. His mom was a teacher. She knew to get them in on time.

It was only after his mom called a family meeting that Finn and his sisters, India (age 14) and Mouse (age 6), were clued in. The next night, the three kids would be shipped to Colorado to live with an uncle. Their mom would be staying behind to finish out the school year so she’d stand a better chance of landing another job after the move. It is a bleak situation that, though fictional, seems real because the emotions of this predicament are channeled through the three kids, who alternate narrating chapters. They are, by turns, anxious and sad as they board the airplane that will take them to an uncertain future in an unfamiliar place.

Their mom had always told them to make lemonade when life gave them lemons. Still, India wonders: “What if I don’t like lemonade? What if I’d rather drink cyanide?”

What happens next is entirely unexpected — not only for the book’s characters but also for its readers. Touching down in Denver, the kids are picked up by a driver in a feathered pink taxi and driven to an alternate reality where they are greeted as if they were celebrities, with cheering fans and salutations written by airplane skywriters. The kids are housed in individual dream homes. Finn’s has a retractable basketball court. India’s, an enviable wardrobe. Each house also comes with a more perfect version of their mom.

Their good fortune isn’t meant to last — only to lull them into believing this new catered-to, individualized reality is better than the one they were forced to leave. When each of them is evicted after a mere few hours in paradise, it’s up to the kids to realize they are better off together and to figure out how to escape from a world that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

When two of the children are trapped inside lockers, the instructions for opening it are a three-fold mind-bender. “One: Remember what you want to forget. Two: Ask yourself a question you can’t answer. Three: Remember what you wish more than anything you hadn’t forgotten.”

In some ways, “No Passengers Beyond This Point” reads like a middle-grade mash-up of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and James Patterson’s “Witch & Wizard” series. The difference is emotionality. In presenting the story from three different children’s ages, and points of view, Choldenko does a wonderful job of channeling the anxieties of young people trying to cope with a situation beyond their control.

Like her bestselling “Al Capone Does My Shirts,” “No Passengers” is literary and relatable. Each character is distinct, presenting a worldview that is age-appropriate and linguistically authentic even if the situation it relates to is apocryphal.

Six-year-old Mouse is particularly delightful as she tries to figure out why her big sister is so mean (it must be her pimples), and why Mouse can’t seem to stop pestering her (India would otherwise forget about her). When India praises someone’s intelligence for knowing how to spell “prosciutto,” Mouse counters: “I’m smarter than that. I can spell hors d’oeuvres.”

Simultaneously heartwarming and spirited, “No Passengers Beyond This Point” takes readers on an unexpected journey about the importance of family, no matter what happens.

susan.carpenter@latimes.com