PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (Starred review) November 1, 1999
Catherine Ryan Hyde, Simon & Schuster, $23 (288p) ISBN 0-684-86271-9

An ordinary boy engineers a secular miracle in Hyde's (Funerals for Horses) winning second novel, set in a small-town 1990's California. Twelve-year-old Trevor McKinney, the son of Arlene, a single mom working two jobs, and Ricky, a deadbeat absentee dad, does not seem well positioned to revolutionize the world. But when Trevor's social studies teacher, Reuben St. Clair, gives the class an extra-credit assignment, challenging his students to design a plan to change society, Trevor decides to start a goodwill chain. To begin, he helps out three people, telling each of them instead of paying him back they must "pay it forward" by helping three others. At first, nothing seems to work out as planned, not even Trevor's attempt to bring Arlene and Reuben together. Granted, Trevor's mother and his teacher are an unlikely couple; she is small, white, attractive, determined but insecure recovering alcoholic, he is an educated black man who lost half his face in Vietnam. But eventually romance does blossom, and unbeknownst to Trevor his other attempts to help do "pay it forward" yielding a chain reaction of newsworthy proportions. Reporter Chris Chandler is the first to chase down the story, and Hyde's narrative is punctuated with excerpts from histories Chandler publishes in later years (Those Who Knew Trevor Speak and The Other Faces Behind the Movement), as well as entries form Trevor's journal. Trevor's ultimate martyrdom, and the extraordinary worldwide success of his project, catapult the drama into the realm of myth, but Hyde's simple prose rarely turns preachy. Her Capraesque theme- that one person can make a difference - may be sentimental but for once, that's a virtue. $250,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPB alternates; 7-city author tour; film rights optioned by Warner Bros. (Feb)

KIRKUS REVIEWS
The buzz is big for this heartwarming, funny, and bittersweet story from Hyde (Funerals for Horses, not reviewed) about a teenager's plan to better the world. It all starts with a man and a boy. The man, Reuben St. Clair, a social-studies teacher who believes in positive thinking but whos also a badly disfigured, black Vietnam vet struggling daily with the way people look at him, assigns the following for extra credit: "Think of an idea for world change, and put it into action.'' The boy, Trevor McKinney, takes the assignment to heart, not only because his mother, Arlene, is battling with alcohol and his father's gone missing, but also because he likes Reuben and begins to think maybe his mom would too. Trevor develops a pyramid payback scheme of good deeds, with the flow of payment reversed, and starts by finding three people he believes he can help, each of whom pledges to help three others. The first, a homeless addict/mechanic, receives Trevor's paper-route earnings and a place to shower before a job interview, but then blows his first paycheck on cocaine and ends up in jail. The second, an elderly woman on the paper route, receives all the yard- and garden-work she needs for free, but later dies in her sleep. The third, Reuben and Arlene considered together as a dysfunctional unit, are brought together by Trevor so they can help each other out of loneliness and just maybe give him a dad in the bargain, but they mix like oil and water. Apparently negative results prove to be just the opposite, however, and, unbeknownst to Trevor, his project snowballs into a national phenomenon with no end in sight. Invited to Washington to be honored by President Clinton, Trevor decides to do one more good deed, a selfless act that again succeeds beyond his wildest expectations. A quiet, steady masterpiece, with an incandescent ending. (Film rights to Warner Bros.; Book-of-the-Month featured alternate/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection; $250,00 ad/promo; author tour) --
Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Chicago Tribune March 3, 2000
CAPRA-ESQUE FABLE FOSTERS INSPIRATIONAL FEELING
By Scott Eyman, Cox News Service.

Simon & Schuster is betting a lot on "Pay It Forward, " and so far the book is living up to expectations. The Book of the Month Club has taken it, and Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment are making the movie for Warner Bros.

And you can see why, for this is a powerful narrative with an idealistic idea grounded in familiar characters.

The story: A schoolteacher in a small California town gives his class an extra-credit project: Come up with an idea that can change the world. A boy named Trevor devises a "chain letter" of deeds: One person does a nice thing for, say, three people, with the proviso that they pay it forward, not back -- that is, those three each have to do a nice thing for three other people, those nine each do something nice for another three apiece, and so forth.

The geometrical implications are obvious; at the 16th level, about 43 million people are suddenly basking in random acts of kindness.

Trevor's project doesn't start out well -- the first recipient of his goodwill is a con on parole who collapses into recidivism; the second is an old lady who dies. But just when Trevor is ready to give up, his idea takes hold, is smelled out by an inquiring reporter, and a worldwide movement leads him to the White House and a beaming Bill Clinton.

This is one of those modern fables that seek to recapture the message of Frank Capra, circa "Meet John Doe" -- to convince us that, beneath the vast panoply of avarice and cunning on daily display, a single human being can make a difference, that heaven can be right here on Earth.

The characters of "Pay It Forward" are all overly familiar types -- the Vietnam vet whose internal scars are even more horrific than the external; the harried but well-meaning blue-collar mother; the cynical, busted journalist -- but what Catherine Ryan Hyde does with them is less familiar.

"Pay It Forward" is much more subtly written than other inspirational books, with believable dialogue and shadings that make the characters seem more lifelike than they have any right to be:

"She wasn't sure if he was asleep. She allowed herself to drift into a feeling, a sense, that she somehow watched all this from above. Not so much physically, but more in a sense of perspective. . . . She wondered if she would remember this feeling next time something seemed, in the short run, to be going wrong. She knew she probably would not. She knew people transcended that line of knowledge all the time, but damned if they didn't tend to cross right back again."

Until an ending that strikes me as an error in judgment, Hyde accomplishes a difficult job with an easy, beneficent wisdom about the ways of the world:

"What we don't get," one character thinks, "we see everywhere we look. What we won't let ourselves do, be, we refuse to tolerate in any other living soul."

The San Francisco Chronicle
One Boy's Attempt to Change the World
REVIEWED BY David Field Sunday, February 6, 2000

``Pay It Forward,'' the new novel by Cambria writer Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of the novel ``Funerals for Horses,'' begins in 2002 with a reporter telling us something both disarmingly simple and mind-bendingly sweeping: A 12-year-old boy changed the world, for the better.

Much better, in fact. Created a world that almost all of us would like to see, and very few, if any of us, believe we will ever see. How and why this happened the reporter will try to reconstruct for us as he digs into the origins of a global phenomenon called ``The Movement.''

Trevor, the boy at the center of this fable, is an only child. His mother, Arlene, works two jobs and is an alcoholic trying to quit booze. Trevor's father, Ricky, has abandoned them. Arlene is wounded and tough and clings to a bankrupt hope that Ricky loves them and will return.

A wrecked truck in their front yard mocks Arlene's illusions. Before he left, Ricky had her co-sign for the truck, then wrecked it, and she's trying to pay off a debt on a truck that will never run again. She resorts to cannibalizing it and selling its parts, and trying to beat it to death with Trevor's baseball bat. As dysfunctional as that sounds, Arlene is a good mother, and Trevor is a remarkably sane and balanced boy. Into Trevor's life comes a teacher, Reuben St. Clair, new to the small town of Atascadero. Reuben is a black Vietnam veteran with a face shockingly disfigured by a grenade accident. He's a solitary man who has retreated far into himself.

Reuben has moved so often that he no longer bothers to unpack his belongings after months of living in a new house. He doesn't expect people to deal honestly with his wounded face, to see behind it. But Trevor isn't put off by Reuben's face. He simply asks him what happened, and Reuben's defenses crack ever so slightly. Reuben challenges his new students to come up with an idea, that they have to put into effect, that has the potential to change the world. Most students ignore the challenge. A few attempt something in order to get a better grade. Only Trevor takes it to heart. What follows is told by a cast of characters ranging from an old woman alone in her home with a ragged garden she's too weak to care for, to a homeless man destroyed by drugs, to two polite grocery store clerks, to a woman on the Golden Gate Bridge ready to jump, to a brutal thug, to a young gay man continually beaten by homophobes, to the reporter narrating the tale, to Trevor's teacher and his mother and, eventually, his father.

All of them are eventually touched by Trevor's idea that if he chooses three people and does something good for them, something important, and they do good deeds for three other people, and so forth, it will create a human chain letter that can go on forever. Trevor's good deeds are those available to an ordinary boy, albeit an extraordinary one. He gives the homeless man his $35-a-week paper route. He spends his weekends and afternoons restoring the old woman's garden to its tended state. And, for his third deed, he tries to bring together a man and a woman he believes could love each other and thereby escape their crushing loneliness: his mother and his wounded teacher. All the characters speak in their own voices of their experience with Trevor's idea of ``paying forward'' a gift they have miraculously received. Some of them know Trevor, some do not. Their voices are varied, realistic and, at times, extremely affecting.

One of Hyde's accomplishments here is that she makes us believe that something as irrational as Trevor's idea could work. Her fable speaks to the hunger so many of us feel for something to believe in that can give us hope for a future that looks increasingly bleak. One might assume this book is meant solely for children, and one hopes this book does become assigned in every high school across America, but the book is also more than suitable for an adult reader.

If the success of Harry Potter suggests that many of us yearn for magic, Hyde's book delivers an even more profound vision of what it may be: the simple magic of the human heart. Trevor is a boy who believes that people are basically good, which by itself is a radical thought.

Trevor is a wonderfully ordinary boy, and yet he lures us into believing in his dream. When his tale is finished, some readers might, after drying their tears, reflect on the possibility that his vision might not be so lunatic after all.

Parents should read this book with their children. Non-parents should read it with someone they love. And if you're as solitary as Rueben St. Clair, read it to yourself.