Impossible Fortress

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Jason Rekulak: Impossible Fortress (2017, Center Point Large Print)

English language

Published Sept. 15, 2017 by Center Point Large Print.

ISBN:
978-1-68324-433-2
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5 stars (3 reviews)

Billy Marvin's first love was a computer. Then he met Mary Zelinsky. Do you remember your first love? The Impossible Fortress begins with a magazine...The year is 1987 and Playboy has just published scandalous photographs of Vanna White, from the popular TV game show Wheel of Fortune . For three teenage boys--Billy, Alf, and Clark--who are desperately uneducated in the ways of women, the magazine is somewhat of a Holy Grail: priceless beyond measure and impossible to attain. So, they hatch a plan to steal it. The heist will be fraught with peril: a locked building, intrepid police officers, rusty fire escapes, leaps across rooftops, electronic alarm systems, and a hyperactive Shih Tzu named Arnold Schwarzenegger. Failed attempt after failed attempt leads them to a genius master plan--they'll swipe the security code to Zelinsky's convenience store by seducing the owner's daughter, Mary Zelinsky. It becomes Billy's mission to befriend her …

10 editions

Review of 'The impossible fortress' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from NetGalley, but I listened to the audiobook version instead.

The Impossible Fortress hits the exact right notes of eighties nostalgia without turning into a catalog of bygone pop culture. It definitely opened a flood of memories for me. I wasn’t a teenager in 1987, but I did spend my childhood teaching myself BASIC on my Apple IIGS and keying in machine language programs printed in the backs of my dad’s computer magazines.

Billy, Alf and Clark just want to see Vanna White in the May 1987 issue of Playboy, and they’ll try just about any harebrained scheme to get it. When they go into a local typewriter repair store and try to convince the owner that they look like serious businessmen who are definitely old enough to buy it, Billy meets Mary, an overweight social outcast who not …

Subjects

  • Fiction, humorous, general
  • Friendship, fiction
  • Fiction, coming of age