I... AM... THE... Cheese?

I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier sounds like a really wimpy title, right? WRONG. The title actually is a reference to that old song, 'The Farmer in the Dell'. Remember how it ends with 'the cheese stands alone'?
Well, Adam in this book is the cheese. He is alone. The book starts off with him pedaling, taking a package a couple towns over to his father. (This is the seventies, so I guess people just let their kids leave home for a couple days on bike with no money...) Then, a few pages later, we see Adam talking to this dude, Brint, who claims to be a doctor. This is actually a medical tape, and it's all being recorded from Brint and Adam's conversation with Adam's thoughts in between. And from the first few pages, we can tell something's up.
This book turns out to be like The Firm for kids, except backwards. Like in The Firm he finds out about the whole criminal organization thing and then goes on the run, and in this book Adam has to struggle to remember what he was on the run from in the first place.
Even though this book was written 35 years ago, it's still really great. I love 70's kids' fiction,
a) because of the lingo they use and
b) because the parents in these books let their kids go EVERYWHERE.
I've never read anything by Robert Cormier before, but I'm gonna go hunt down The Chocolate War after this.