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Library Binding
ISBN: 0803719493
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Gr. 3^-6. "I wanted to be bad, so bad no one would mess with me." The setting is a bleak city neighborhood, but every bullied kid will understand Jack's wish. In simple free verse, he tells how he tries to stay out of trouble, but Reebo is out to get him. Jack steals his dad's revolver ("as he [sleeps] off his latest beer" ) and wonders if his dad would care if anything happened to him. Jack's friend, Sherms, does care, and he's appalled when Jack appears with the gun. Jack is white; both his friend and his enemy are black. Sure enough, the bully confronts Jack, Sherms tries to intervene, the gun goes off, Sherms is wounded--but then everything works out all right in the end. Diaz's dramatic, framed mixed-media paintings of schoolyard friendship and confrontation are like larger-than-life street murals, almost comic book in style with huge eyes and exaggerated gestures. As in his Caldecott winner, Smoky Nights (1994), the background evokes a kind of feverish excitement with neon-lit graffiti, peeling walls, flashing color. The writing is terse, the standoffs dramatic ("Reebo just smiled like ice sliced thin" ), but the story is so contrived, the messages so heavy-handed, that few kids will buy either the warnings or the neat solutions. Walter Dean Myers did it far better in his great Newbery Honor Book Scorpions (1988), in which the gun drives the friends apart, and there's no happy ending. Hazel Rochman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. |
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