This is a book about confronting fears and the past, and possibly the importance of friendship but that's iffy. Jokester Rudy is worried when his friend Barney takes up with the new kid Tyler ("Styler", because he's stylish. yeesh) from L.A. Tyler has somehow gotten his hands on a map to one of the local abandoned goldmines where there's millions of dollars in gold just waiting to be picked up. Barney is psyched, but Rudy is scared but doesn't want to fess up to it, but he's running out of excuses. I would feel bad for Rudy if he weren't completely obnoxious. He does impressions. When he introduces himself to the reader he goes on about how funny he is, how he's been funny since 1st grade when he starts this campaign of sexual harassment towards a pretty girl in class. It involves constant declarations of love and dying of heartbreak in public, notes, stalking, and staring. He still does it five, six years later. She doesn't think its funny, but how the teachers and her friends laugh! Later, Rudy criticizes Styler for hitting on an older, pretty neighbor girl and being a "creep" about it. No irony at all.So as annoying as Styler and his calling Rudy "Chickie-baby" is, I have no sympathy, even when, late in the book, it comes out about Rudy's neglectful stepfather and how his hyper littler sisters are traumatized, too. Direct author comparisons aren't really fair, but since I came into a short stack of Mary Downing Hahn and Zilpha Keatley Snyder books I couldn't help but make them. Snyder's best supernatural/troubled kid books can go toe to toe with Hahn's any day of the week, but these books were standard contemporary fictions and stories inspired by their childhoods without a ghost or spook in sight. Snyder came off as the much weaker writer, seemingly unable to create a compelling character without some greater outside force to define them.
