In [The Bumblebee Flies Anyway], a story that is as trenchant as it is poignant, Cormier shows the courage and desperation of adolescents who know that their deaths are imminent. Barney, sixteen, is the only patient who is in the experimental hospital who is not in the group of the doomed but is there as a control: all of them are there voluntarily, some to contribute to research and some, like Mazzo, hoping for a quick death…. Barney thinks of a plan that will give Mazzo the quick, daring death he wants; secretly he reconstructs a life-size model of a car from the dump next door, pulls the plug on Mazzo's life-support system, and helps him to the roof where the car waits to be pushed off for one last glorious flight. The story, which has an element of twin telepathy, involves questions of medical ethics and freedom of choice, and ends with Barney, who in the course of his treatments and his conversation with his doctor, has learned that he too is going to die, remembering with persistent joy, despite his gray fog of pain, the beauty of the flight, his last achievement. This is, although it is tragic, a stunning book: Cormier creates convincingly the hospital world of the terminally ill, the pathos of Barney's love for Cassie [Mazzo's twin sister] and his struggles with the hallucinations induced by the treatments that are designed to block his knowledge and help him forget his true condition. It moves, with relentless inevitability, like an ancient Greek tragedy, with the compassion of the staff a contrapuntal note, to the requiem of hopeless despair that, for each patient, still holds some passion for an affirmative act of life. (pp. 3-4)
Zena Sutherland, in a review of "The Bumblebee Flies Anyway," in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Vol. 37, No. 1, September, 1983, pp. 3-4.
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