Took time this morning to work on the materials for the New Jersey Library Association presentations I will do at the end of the month. So looking forward to going to NJLA and then on to NYC for a day or two. Power Points are done and up at Slideshare already. Feeling very noble and all that jazz/ Spent most of the second half of the day reading MESSED UP.
R.D. does mess up quite a bit. He is 15 and still in the 8th grade. He lives with his grandmother who has taken off and left him behind with Earl, her old boyfriend and the closest thing to a parent R.D. has or ever has had. Here it is the first day of school and R.D. is already suspended for fighting even though he was just trying to keep a smaller girl from being jacked by one much larger. Oh well, that's par for the course.
What R.D. does not count on, though, is coming home late one day to find Earl dead. R.D. knows that if anyone knows he is on his own, it is CPS for sure. How long can he fool everyone else about his circumstances?
R.D. is an interesting kid. In some ways, he reminds me of Iggy from KL Going's novel ST. IGGY. He knows the right thing to do, but sometimes he just cannot quite manage to do it. However, there is more hope and more success at redemption for R.D. A caring first year teacher, a just beginning friendship with a girl he might never have given the time of day to beforehand, and some other events conspire to make R.D. care enough about his own future to ask for help in small ways without revealing his greatest need. I am anxious, as always, to hear what others think, especially teens.