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13-year-old Remy DuMont, newly arrived from Haiti, where his family lived in poverty, hopes that life will be different in West Oakland, California, where refrigerators, hot running water and television are but three new wonders. But when he and his parents move into the second-floor apartment of a spooky old Victorian house in a neighborhood haunted by real-life terrors of gangs, drugs and violence, the last thing Remy expects are ghosts Every night at 3:13 while his mother and father sleep, Remy hears a train approaching, seemingly headed straight for the house. From his window he sees a murder committed aboard the train as it rumbles past below. Remy soon realizes that the murderer, the v...
Rats In The Trees is Jess Mowry's first book, written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Co. of Santa Barbara, California in 1990. It's a collection of interrelated stories about street kids, though most about Robby, a 13-year-old boy from Fresno, California who runs away from a foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone, he's befriended by a "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds who call themselves The Animals. Rats portrays the conditions for many inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of Ronald Regan's "trickle-down theory" and the beginning of George H.W. Bush's "kinder, gentler nation" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to floo...
The 'hood is divided by invisible lines, but only those in the know can see them. The Friends and The Crew, two rival gangs, form an uneasy truce against a powerful force - Deek and his drugs, his Uzis and his Trans Am. All sixteen-year-old Ty wants is to keep his kid brother safe but Deek is pushing him way past cool. When smoldering tensions explode Ty must face his own fears and decide what kind of man he is to become.
For thirteen-year-old Dante and his friends, life in Babylon isn't about having choices but only trying to stay alive. Dante, born to a crack-addicted mother, needs a heart operation if he hopes to live to reach thirty; Pook seemingly has no hope of going to medical school and becoming a doctor; Wyatt's biggest handicap is being smart in a mostly stupid place - a disadvantage shared by his little brother, Cheo - Jinx is trying to get off crack; and Radgi is homeless out on the streets. But when the boys find a package of pure coke dumped by a drug-dealer running from cops, it suddenly seems that they do have choices... if they can somehow sell it. But that's a very dangerous choice... and will it be the right one?
Some might say that 14-year-old Brandon Williams is an over-privileged white kid. He lives in a million-dollar house overlooking the ocean in Santa Cruz, California, gets a weekly allowance equal to the take-home pay of many service industry workers, and has gone to a private, all-white school from Kindergarten through eighth grade. Despite the protests of his liberal-minded and loving, but career-oriented and somewhat distant parents, Brandon decides to attend public high school. His first day is a reality-check as he discovers what public education in the U.S. is all about... pounding just enough knowledge and mainstream values into kids' empty skulls so they can get their McFreakin' diplo...
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On the road with the Blank Generation, "Go Now" takes readers on a wild trip across the country and into the head of a down-on-his-luck punk musician. ""Go Now" is a vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience".--William Gibson.
Kids run away for many reasons; abusive parents, a bad environment, poverty, lack of love or respect at home. A few run away for adventure. Others hope to find a better life, but most discover that life on the street is cold, hungry and lonely. It's also a jungle of predators. The smarter - or luckier - kids usually find that no matter how bad things were at home, at least they had a bed to sleep in and a chance to really escape by going to school and preparing themselves to win life's battles. Most runaways are heard from again, days, weeks, even months later. But a few kids just disappear, and only their faces on milk cartons, or images on "missing" websites prove they once existed. Collin...
"On the day Corbitt Wainwright's father is imprisoned for attacking a white man, the thirteen-year-old's adolescence is abruptly cut short. Dreams of success through good grades and hard work are wiped aside as white society shows him, out of both kindness and malice, that poor black kids in Mississippi don't have much of a hand in creating their own destinies. But Corbitt refuses to accept his allotted role, and after a deadly confrontation with his father's accuser, he sets out for California, the land of opportunity and racial equality." "What he finds on arriving in West Oakland is another world altogether, a world populated by gangs and crack dealers, violent cops and street kids, where...
Award-winning contributors are featured in this anthology of original storiesevoking dilemmas of faith and identity.