Dead End In Norvelt Summary

Dead End in Norvelt, by Jack Gantos, portrayed the adventurous yet boring summer of a boy, Jack, whose plans for summer are ravaged when he gets grounded for making some highly immature choices. But, getting “grounded for life also brought many adventures, mysteries, understandings, and experiences of a lifetime. Jack made some pretty bad decisions in a short amount of time. First, he gets one warning after another. Later, he disobeyed his mom and cut down the rest of the field anyway, and he ran away from getting yelled at, so he got in big trouble. In his mom’s head, it all added up to “grounded for life.” Shortly after meeting, Jack and Ms. Volker become very good companions and both help each other. In the end, Jack finds out why the elder …show more content…
When he first went to Ms. Volker’s house to help, he saw a weird map with houses labeled with an address and a two character name, a single uppercase letter followed by a number. Ms. Volker then told him it was a map of the original Norvelt and that the names helped the volunteer firefighters gets to the houses quicker; the two character names were easier to remember than the full address. Norvelt was built so those without money could still make a living, bartering for the supplies they needed. All the 250 original houses were were built by the residents. One family would first help their neighbors build their house, then their neighbors would help them build their house. When Jack and Ms. Volker were driving to check on an elder, Ms. Volker told Jack that Norvelt was named after Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor made sure that everyone got their own small but usable house instead of sharing a large one with multiple families. So, the humble little town was named Norvelt, which came from the “nor” of “Eleanor”, and the “velt” of “Roosevelt”. For some reason, Mr. Huffer is Moving all the empty houses to West Virginia. After some questioning, Jack finds out that Mr. Huffer is doing this to clear up Norvelt for him to