Gr. 7-10. A nonlinear narrative spun out from actions, both good and bad, and their ever-circling consequences, Fleischman's latest is an unusual construction, its parts fitting together in delicate balance, much like those of the whirligig of the title and the story's central metaphor. Driving home drunk from a party, Brent tries to kill himself by letting go of the wheel but instead kills another teenager. Her grief-stricken mother doesn't seek revenge; rather, she hands Brent a 45-day Greyhound bus pass and tells him that, since her daughter Lea loved whirligigs, she wants Brent to build four, each with Lea's face and name, and plant them in the four corners of the U.S.--Washington State, California, Maine, and Florida. Brent's journey of expiation across that summer alternates with beautiful, quicksilver stories, told in different time frames, of how the whirligigs that he builds and leaves behind profoundly affect the lives of a too-studious eighth-grader and her best friend in Maine, a Puerto Rican street sweeper in Miami, an adopted Korean boy in Washington, and a teenager and her dying grandmother in San Diego. Brent never becomes quite real; his struggle with tools, directions, and sorrow sometimes is pulled under by its own weight, but the story as a whole and the inner sense of self that Brent achieves through his experiences are mesmerizing. The language of the whirligig stories gleams and soars: a metaphor of movement, dance, laughter, and irrepressible life. Like the ritual journey in Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons (1994) and Uncle Ob's whirligigs in Cynthia Rylant's Missing May (1992), loss, fear, and guilt in Fleischman's story find a universally recognizable shape. (Reviewed April 1, 1998)¾: GraceAnne A. DeCandido.