The colossus of roads

Eleven-year-old Rick is an Angeleno with two truly unusual talents: a genius for understanding traffic patterns and how to fix them and a gift for coaxing trust and friendship out of Mila, a shy, silent, artistic younger neighbor. Both come into play when Mila quietly invites him to join her in a Girl Scouts arts project--fancifully repainting old road signs to be posted around the city as street art. To Rick, frustrated by repeated fruitless efforts to contact the local department of transportation, this looks like a golden opportunity to prove the worth of his ingenious "Snarl Solutions" while also saving his parents' Polish catering business, which is on the verge of going under due to an inability to make timely deliveries. A few forged work orders later, well-placed and amusingly altered signs have caused the hellish traffic jams on the freeway over Sepulveda Pass to disappear. But this triumph is just a warm-up for two even tougher tests. Mila's discovery that Rick, the self-styled "Colossus of Roads," has used her work without asking opens a rift of betrayal that seems unbridgeable. Then a major earthquake leaves Mila's troop stranded amidst a massive tangle of blocked and impassable streets. Readers with underappreciated talents of their own will be heartened by Uss' (The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, 2018) ultimately unabashedly feel-good sophomore tale.

Eleven-year-old Rick Rusek is a traffic-pattern savant. He lives in Los Angeles, where he studies the streets and highways of the metropolis looking for ways to ease traffic. When Rick becomes involved in a street-art project with his friend Mila Herrera, he realizes its his chance to secretly implement some of his traffic solutions and in so doing boost his parents catering business and solve their financial troubles. An eccentric cast of supporting characters surrounds Rick, including Mila and her extended family. As Rick works on his project, he learns that his neighbors and friends have hidden hobbies and talents (Milas mom is a member of a traffic-disrupting guerrilla bicycle club; her abuelita belongs to a club of senior citizens who weave erratically through neighborhood traffic, determined to slow down other drivers and protect pedestrians) and that he himself is gifted at more than just moving cars around the city. This is a quintessentially Southern California story, in which highway traffic over the Sepulveda Pass is more of an antagonist than even an earthquake. Uss (The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, rev. 7/18) invites her readers to suspend disbelief just long enough for Rick to save the day. Maeve Visser Knoth July/August 2020 p.144(c) Copyright 2020. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Los Angeles' infamous traffic scene is a hot mess, and it's up to 11-year-old Rick Rusek to fix it. Deep in the San Fernando Valley lives the audacious young problem-solver, poring over maps of LA's highways and streets to diagnose a way to unclog the county's traffic woes. Ironically, Rick can't bear car trips due to an unrelenting case of motion sickness. Just ask his chatty stomach, a cheeseburger-obsessed conversationalist that helps Rick with unknotting the trickiest of ideas. Rick's chats with his stomach offer one source of reassurance after he finds out that his parents' catering business, Smotch (roots: Polish food), risks falling into financial troubles due in part to LA's notorious traffic flow. Convinced that his Snarl Solutions could help alleviate his parents' problems if only someone in power would listen, Rick joins his neighbor's Girl Scout group, led by a celebrated street artist with familial ties to the head of LA's Department of Transportation. Can the "Colossus of Roads" save his parents' business and lead LA toward a brighter future? Uss' slice of whimsy teleports readers to the smog-filled, congested streets of Los Angeles and gives them a hearty appreciation for big, improbable ideas. Thanks to a fun cast of eclectic characters, the author manages to temper the story's more peculiar moments, but it's her soft mix of humor and insight that steals the spotlight. Though Rick's neighbors are Latinx, the book's default seems to be white. Colossally cool. (Fiction. 9-12) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Eleven-year-old Rick is an Angeleno with two truly unusual talents: a genius for understanding traffic patterns and how to fix them and a gift for coaxing trust and friendship out of Mila, a shy, silent, artistic younger neighbor. Both come into play when Mila quietly invites him to join her in a Girl Scouts arts project—fancifully repainting old road signs to be posted around the city as street art. To Rick, frustrated by repeated fruitless efforts to contact the local department of transportation, this looks like a golden opportunity to prove the worth of his ingenious "Snarl Solutions" while also saving his parents' Polish catering business, which is on the verge of going under due to an inability to make timely deliveries. A few forged work orders later, well-placed and amusingly altered signs have caused the hellish traffic jams on the freeway over Sepulveda Pass to disappear. But this triumph is just a warm-up for two even tougher tests. Mila's discovery that Rick, the self-styled "Colossus of Roads," has used her work without asking opens a rift of betrayal that seems unbridgeable. Then a major earthquake leaves Mila's troop stranded amidst a massive tangle of blocked and impassable streets. Readers with underappreciated talents of their own will be heartened by Uss' (The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, 2018) ultimately unabashedly feel-good sophomore tale. Grades 4-6. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.