Rating: 
Summary: The Rag and the Bone Shop!
Review: Robert Cormier is a great young-adult author. He really knows how to incorporate a good mix of adult literature with teenage literature. However, The Rag and the Bone Shop is not one of his best books. The book starts out pretty good. All the events lead right to the climax, but my major conflict with this book is that story is very expected. When Cormier starts to get into the rising action, the climax is expected. It seems that you are just waiting for the inevitable. Although all of the information seems to be needed to make up the entire plot, it just takes to long to get to the climax. The conflict with in the book is the way overused murder of a young child. The main suspect is her neighborhood friend Jason. Jason is twelve years old and liked to do jigsaw puzzles with Alicia. Jason was the last person to see her-except the killer. Through some interesting maneuvers the police get Jason's mom to allow him to go down to the police station for questioning. The police bring in their ace interrogator, Trent. Trent always gets a confession and they're hoping he can get another one. This time out of Jason! The ending won't surprise you, but it will upset you. The book ends with a little bit of a cliffhanger, maybe to leave room for a sequel. Unfortunately Robert Cormier died almost immediately after writing this book. The Rag and The Bone Shop is a good book for junior high students and it is also a great introduction book into young adult literature, but I wouldn't read it if I were in high school. After carefully weighing every aspect of the book, I decided to give it a 3 out of 5 because it is a good book for YOUNG adults.
Rating: 
Summary: A dark but important story
Review: Robert Cormier says more with simple language and basic form than most novelist can with a dictionary of words and advanced techniques. Better than any other young adult novelist that I'm aware of, he encourages his readers to question authority and think for themselves. The Rag and Bone Shop demonstrates how police detectives garner confessions through manipulation and deception. It touches on the political forces which compromise due process and concretizes a sociological concept known as "the looking glass self." Those who think that this story of a star interrogator who terrorizes a 12 year old boy believing it will advance his career is farfetched and unfair should read James Bovard's book Lost Rights. This work documents an incident when a police officer tricked a child into turning his parents in for marijuana possession by exaggerating the dangers of the drug and promising only to help them Incidents such as this make such a dark story necessary.
Rating:
Summary: An Okay Book
Review: The Rag and Bone Shop
By: Robert Cormier
Reviewed by: S. Ali
A seven year old girl is murderd. By who no one know's who. A twelve-year-old boy named Jason was the last to see her alive, except the killer. Unless Jason is the killer. After Jason confesses to something he knows he didn't do, which makes him almost physically ill, he feels he must be capable of murder and should justify his confession. He takes a butcher knife and goes out to find the town bully.The girl's brother confesses to the crime. I liked the book for a couple of reasons. One beacuse i like books that involve murders and law. It is fasinating to me. Another reason is beacuse the story kept wanting me to turn the page to see what happens next. I would call it a suspence story, in a way. It was a okay book to read. In a way the story was very unrealistic. How is a twelve-year-old boy friends with a seven-year-old girl. And, how is the girl so talented. She can finsh a 1,000 piece jig-saw-puzzle of a red cardinal. Plus, she is a talented writer. She was a very special gurl. My favorite part of this story, The Rag and Bone Shop. Is in the begginning of the book. When Jason Dorrant is at little Alicia Bartlett's house. The last time he saw her alive. He was over her hosue and they were woking on a jig-saw-puzzle. While, he older brother had his freinds over for a swim. And Alicia is furious because her brother won't be quiet. She is sick and tired of yelling at her brother. That was my favorite part. Beacuse Jason feels weird, being there with Alicia.
Rating:
Summary: The Rag and Bone Shop
Review: The Rag and Bone Shop
The Rag and Bone Shop was written by Robert Cormier. The genre is a form of chiller and suspense. The general plot to this story is to find out the true killer of a little girl.
The quality of Robert Cormier's writing is that he will lead you off from a really good beginning to a different style of the story to a weird and bizarre ending to the story. Another quality of the way that Cormier wrote The Rag and Bone Shop was a form of beauty.
If I was able to pick one thing that I liked about the book is when Jason knocked Bobo on his butt with one hit. The main style of Cormier's writing is that he wants people to feel a sort of terror to be beheld in the reader until the end. The detail that Cormier put into the beginning of the book is astonishing.
Rating:
Summary: For older teens: a quick read that packs a punch
Review: The Rag and Bone Shop, Robert Cormier's last book before his death, is not for the young or faint of heart.
Interrogated by an expert, 12 yr. old Jason cannot avoid linking himself to the murdered 7 yr old. Does what he say cause him to become someone different? In the windowless interrogation room he perceives the double-edged sword of reality and its underlying currents of suspicion and need. This book is for mature readers because the seemingly simple story twists and turns into a stark fatal attraction. Are truth and justice found in the rag and bone shop? The suspense builds with each answer that Jason gives. Like writing an epitaph on a tombstone, author Robert Cormier lures the reader into formulating and answering a poignant question. And not until the end does he...reader, this is a master at work; you'll not want to close the cover of this powerful, slim book.
Rating:
Summary: Cruel and disturbing
Review: This is a book you might not want your impressionable preteen to read. I found it painful. A seven-year-old girl is murdered. The town's chief detective gets it into his head (for no good reason) that the girl's twelve-year-old friend Jason, the last person who admits to seeing her alive, has killed her. (He didn't.) An expert interrogator is called in to get a confession out of Jason, a boy with little self-esteem. After Jason confesses to something he knows he didn't do, which makes him almost physically ill, he feels he must be capable of murder and should justify his confession. He takes a butcher knife and goes out to find the town bully. The interrogation was completely illegal. No parent or lawyer was present. The confession would not have been admissible in court. The girl's brother confesses to the crime. But Jason is destroyed anyway.
Rating:
Summary: The Rag and Bone Shop
Review: The Rag and Bone Shop by Robert Cormier is about a twelve year old boy, Jason Dorrant, who is enjoying his summer vacation. Then, a seven year old girl, who is Jason's friend's sister, shows up dead in her backyard, and the last person to see her was Jason. The entire town waits impatiently while a big time interrogator figueres out if Jason is the murderer.
This book is a very quick read. It always keeps you going and wanting to read more. But that's about it for its positives qualities. This book feels very unrealistic because a twelve year old boy, in middle school, hangs out with his eight year old sister and a seven year old girl. This does not seem very realistic. The characters are very mature for their ages. The seven-year-old is able to do a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of a red cardinal. The eight-year-old is already writing her own detectives stories, too. The characters needed to be older in order to fit their personalities. I found this book interesting, yet, unrealistic which is why I give it 3 stars.
Rating: 
Summary: In Keeping with the Cormier Legacy
Review: Trent, a star police interrogator, known for his perfect record of extracting confessions from even the most stubborn of killers, is called in to perform his craft on the prime suspect, a twelve year-old boy, in the bludgeoning of a seven year-old girl. While the boy is a something of a loner, whose closest thing to a friend was the dead girl, Trent is also solitary, driven into emotional isolation by the death of his wife and the grimness of his work. But when Trent suspects that the boy might be innocent, he is confronted by his conscience and must make a crucial choice.
For a writer whose work is soaked through with such violent and dark subjects as rape, serial murder, and terrorism, it is odd that Cormier is thought of as a writer for teens. But when you consider that his young heroes, be it Jerry Renault or the kid in "Fade", are always given the power to make ethical choices, even in an oppressively corrupt world. In this book, the hero is given the same sort of choice.
Rating: 
Summary: doesn't live up to his earlier works
Review: Like his other later works, this novel doesn't live up to the high quality and high writings of his "middle" novels, such as "The Bumblebee Flies Anyway" and "The Chocolate War" and "After the First Death." I don't think it's a coincidence that the bulk of Cormier's awards have been for those books of his middle period. This book has some interesting parts to it, but doesn't have sufficient motivation of the characters and completely falls apart on the last page with a very false ending.
Rating:
Summary: An economy of words, an exacting story!
Review: Robert Cormier doesn't waste words. In his lifetime, he penned over 25 young adult novels...each one a gem in its own right. With "Rag and Bone Shop", he delves into darker territory with a precise economy of words, but doesn't ignore the deep emotional territory on which he treads...or at least his characters. Telling the tale of Jason Dorrant, a middle-school youngster who is accused of killing his friends younger sister, Alicia Bartlett, Cormier drives the story along quickly and deftly. In a political (aren't they all?) manuever, local officials bring in Trent, an ace interrigator, who is known for eliciting confessions from even the most innocent suspects. Jason is brought into the local police station, and sequestered with Trent, who is undergoing some personal doubts about himself, the fairly recent death of his wife, and about the young man he is hired to make confess. Cormier handles this taut, suspenseful story with guts and grit, drawing his characters with broad strokes, but making them feel like we've known them for some time.
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