About This Book

In I Am the Cheese, Robert Cormier brings a nightmare scenario to life. The chilling book has three narrative threads. In the first, we meet Adam through his own first-person accounts; he is a teenager who is on a difficult journey, traveling by bike to meet his father in Vermont. In the second, we read transcripts of taped interviews of Adam and someone who seems to be a psychiatrist helping him recall his past. Adam seems terrified of what's happened in his past, though he's also scared of the gaps in his memory. Through these transcripts, we learn that while working as a journalist, Adam's father gathered evidence of widespread corruption and has testified before a secret government committee. As a result, his whole family was given new identities for their own protection.

In the third thread of this sophisticated novel, we discover that Adam's journey to Vermont is really a trip of his imagination as he rides his bike around an institution's garden. Adam's parents have been killed, betrayed by the man who had been their link to the protection program. Adam himself is alive only because bureaucratic rules prevent his "termination" (so far). His very life is at the mercy of those who allowed his parents to be killed. His sanity, it becomes clear, has already been sacrificed.

About the Authors or Illustrators

Robert Cormier

The beloved author of such quintessential young adult novels as The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese began writing at age 12 and never looked back. He has won many prizes, both for his journalistic work and for his young adult novels.

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