Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"I get by with a little help from my friends
I'm gonna try with a little help from my friends"
-- The Beatles

"He turns left and left again, circling back onto Jackson. It's effortless. The wheel is an extension of his hands, just the way he likes it. Gecko's the car, and the car is Gecko. Not bad, this M4...
"Uh-oh. The bald guy's dead ahead, and he's managed to flag down a traffic cop. The cop steps right into the Infiniti's path, holding his hand out like, well, a cop. Gecko slaloms around him and then floors it. In the blink of an eye, the Infiniti is halfway down the next block. Gecko grins into the mirror. The officer and the car owner scramble helplessly in his wake.
"The smile disappears abruptly as his rearview changes. The door of the shop bursts open, and out stumble Ruben and his two cronies, weighed down with huge armloads of video games. One of them actually runs into the traffic cop, bowling him over in a spray of falling cases.
"Gecko shifts into reverse. Now the acceleration is pressing on his chest, propelling him backward. Uh-oh. The light changes. A solid line of traffic is coming at him from the other direction. He presses on the gas, steering with one hand as he peers over his shoulder at the tons of metal hurtling toward him. The gap disappears in a heartbeat, split seconds to impact --"

I want to meet the kid who isn't immediately sucked in by the high octane opening scene of THE JUVIE THREE. (It ends with that Infiniti flipped upside down and Gecko blacked out inside.)

Gecko, the thirteen-year-old getaway "man" who is prone to "not thinking," subsequently finds himself in the Jerome Atchison Juvenile Detention Center. Meanwhile, Terrance Florian, a teen gang member from Chicago has been a resident in an alternative detention program at Lion's Head Island. And fifteen-year-old convicted murderer Arjay Moran, "a six-foot-five, 260 pound African American, built like a wrestler, with a barrel chest and huge arms," has been incarcerated in Remsenville, an adult correctional facility.

The three teens are now being released into the custody of Douglas Healy. Healy has received a New Directions grant from the Garfield Foundation "to create a living situation for boys in the juvenile detention system." He will be living with and supervising the trio in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They will be carefully overseen during every moment as they attend a public high school, participate in community service, take part in group counseling, and share the cooking and cleaning. There will be no contact of any kind for the first six months with family or old friends, and there will be no unsupervised time for getting into trouble.

If any one of the three kids screws up, then all of them will be forced to return to the respective hellish situations from which Healy has rescued them. Ms.Vaughn, a harsh, skeptical, and seriously overworked social worker, doesn't like this setup one bit, and is gunning for catching one of them stepping out of line so that she can pull the plug on this misguided experiment.

"Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run,
There's still time to change the road you're on."
--Led Zepplin, "Stairway to Heaven"

As two of the teens try to stop the third's middle-of-the-night attempt to slip out of the apartment, they accidentally but severely injure Mr. Healy. Leaving him, in a coma, outside the entrance to a nearby emergency room, THE JUVIE THREE is the story of how the three teens individually and collectively move forward as the time ticks away on their freedom.

"It reminds him of a story he studied in middle school. A condemned man staves off his execution by promising that, in a single year, he can teach the king's favorite horse to talk. Someone asks why he would make such a ridiculous bargain.
"He replies, 'A year is a long time. I may die. Or the king may die. Or the horse may die. Or the horse may talk.'
"Freedom equals possibility. The horse may talk."

One of those read-it-in-one-gulp books, THE JUVIE THREE is a smart, sweet, breathless romp through Manhattan that is appropriate for and is certain to be a hit with middle school students. High action is interwoven with the steady peeling away of the layers to reveal what each of these three kids is really made of. I am also really moved by the character of Healy, a former problem kid who has survived his own adolescence and now hopes to do something for the next generation.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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