Car Trouble By Jeanne Duprau

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Recommended: use of Symbolism

For my reading assignment I read “Car Trouble” by Jeanne Duprau. The story takes place in many cities in the United States. Some are real places like Richmond, Virginia, St. Louis, Missouri, and Los Angeles, California. The book also has some fictional towns like Sunville, New Mexico, a town built completely off of solar power and other natural resources. There are many more real and fake cities throughout the story, but the ones mentioned are the most written about and most important to the story.

The story’s time period is never mentioned but it is believably in present time, due to the use of computers and cell phones and other modern-day technology.

This story has many characters with various personalities that keep the story interesting. It gives the book a couple of different things to think about at once. The main character is Duff Pringle, a twenty-ish-year-old computer genius who lives in Virginia and is set on his way to get a computer programming job opening in Los Angeles. He knows a lot about computers and claims to always think like one. But his knowledge of cars is minimal. This is really what gets Duff stuck in “Car Trouble”.

The story kicks off right away as Duff is leaving his parents’ house in Richmond, Virginia. He is beginning his journey to Los Angeles to be a computer programmer. He leaves his home town in his used three-thousand dollar, white, Ford Escort. He bought the car from the owner of a pizza shop down the street strictly for the long trip. Duff didn’t care much about cars, as longs as they get him from place to place. Duff pulls onto the highway and drives for about fifteen minutes before something goes terribly wrong. A weird noise came from the front of the car and then a loud bang. The car rolled to a stop near a small exit. Duff looked at the engine, but had no hope of knowing what happened. So Duff called a tow-truck which took the car five miles west to a garage in a small hick town. The mechanics diagnosed that he had thrown an engine rod. This usually happens if the engine doesn’t get oiled enough. Duff had no idea of the last oil change since he had only had the car for two weeks.

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