The technique in I am the Cheese … is an exacting one, and to follow the tripartite narrative readers will have to be alert as well as concerned if they are to realise its full value. There is no mitigation of the terror or the peril of Adam Farmer, a boy of fourteen whose privacy is invaded and whose mind is almost destroyed by the secret, unassailable agencies of government…. Through hints, half-truths, the brutal insistence of Brint the questioner and the pathetic delusion of the boy, the a...

For [I am the Cheese] Robert Cormier has returned to the theme which dominated his outstanding earlier book, The Chocolate War: that of innocence and morality destroyed by the ruthless ambition of the masters of a corrupt society. In The Chocolate War, this society was a private school, and the victim a boy who alone stood out against corruption. Now, in I am the Cheese, Robert Cormier has extended this dark theme. The hero is an unwilling, uncomprehending and truly innocent victim of a greater, more hideou...

Cormier has written a novel of psychological suspense [in "I Am the Cheese"]. He is a fine technician and this is an absorbing, even a brilliant job. The book is assembled in mosaic fashion: a tiny chip here, a chip there, and suddenly the outline of a face dimly begins to take shape. Everything is related to something else; everything builds and builds to a fearsome climax. At the end the boy discovers that he is indeed the cheese—the bait around which the rats gather. Little can he do...

[I Am the Cheese], a magnificent accomplishment, begins innocuously with a first-person narrative: "I am riding the bicycle and I am on Route 31 in Monument, Massachusetts, on my way to Ruttersburg, Vermont, and I'm pedaling furiously because this is an old-fashioned bike…." The reader, however, is suddenly jolted by a shift in point of view: the appearance of the official-looking transcript of a taped dialogue between the protagonist of the story and Brint, a mysterious interloc...

Young Adam's bicycle journey … begins ordinarily enough [in I am the Cheese], and his recollections of the events leading up to the accident seem at first coherent and believable, but when the narrative begins to be interspersed with transcripts of recorded interrogations of the boy by a patient but cold and remorseless interviewer, the picture gradually takes on a nightmare quality. The nightmare becomes wilder and wilder, the suspense tauter and tauter, and the climax, when Adam's tru...