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

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It was an opportunity that few children get to experience these days. In the winter there were dry, brutally cold Saturdays and week-long vacations from school when the ground was rock hard outside. Inside the unheated shell of a house under construction, I'd be able to see my breath throughout the long hours I'd be working to assemble a baseboard heating system or install the bathroom fixtures. During the hot and humid summer days there would also be foundations that required backfilling by hand on the side of the houses that were too close to a property line for the machines to do the work. At such times I became the shoveling machine.

Having that confidence as a twelve or thirteen year old that came from repeatedly and competently doing the skilled work of an adult went a long way toward mitigating the effects of abuse dished out at school by the alpha-delinquents and the hormonally challenged. Having that opportunity to spend long hours working with my parents in their construction business meant having a different kind of quality time and relationship with them, one that had a really deep foundation. When, as a fifteen and sixteen year old, I was growing my hair long, going off to peace rallies, and speaking out forcefully and in public against some of their most deeply held beliefs, I still had a basis on which to see eye to eye with them. My parents would see past all the uncomfortable differences because they recognized how hard I had worked, and continued to work, for the benefit of the family.

Because of my own family history, I have a special affinity with such characters as Paul Edward Logan from Milder Taylor's THE LAND and DJ Schwenk from Catherine Gilbert Murdock's DAIRY QUEEN. While these particular two characters are living a century and a half apart, both have child-parent relationships that are significantly affected by their exceptional abilities and their determination to learn work-related skills from their fathers and do quality work that measures up to that of adults.

Because getting to work on those construction jobs with my father meant so much to me, I am deeply affected by the story of Ty Johnson, a teen who has necessarily become a major Brooklyn drug dealer as a result of being a dutiful son and assuming responsibility for his incarcerated father's illicit business affairs.

"Ask any brother in the Projects who his hero is, and you'll hear the names of basketball and football players.
"My hero was my dad. He was everything a man oughta be: strong, successful, smart. Men wanted to be his friend or they stayed away because they were afraid. Women couldn't get enough of him. He went to parent-teacher conferences just to hit on my teachers.
"Orlando Johnson was raised by his grandma, dirt poor, in Prospect Heights. His mother died of a heart problem just after his brother Jean was born, and his father, well, he didn't know nothing about him, except that his father was better looking than Jean's. Grandma Johnson told him that much. She was a crabby old witch who was only good for one thing: bitching. She was too lazy to get off her saggy ass and get a job, but her nasty mouth wasn't too lazy to tell Orlando and Little Jean how she wished they was never born.
"Orlando never knew a scrap of clothes that wasn't from the Salvation Army or a taste of meat that the butcher wasn't gonna throw out, anyway. Not until he started 'running the trash' for a family of Italian mafioso. Working for a man called Peter Ferrese, Orlando learned all about Brooklyn's underworld. Strip clubs, brothels, weapons, drugs, there was nothing he wasn't into. And when Peter retired from the business, Orlando went out on his own.
"Sure, he got caught. But in his day, he was king. He lived the American Dream. And once he got out, he'd be back on top again, with me by his side."

STREET PHARM is a tense, high-action tale involving a dark and deadly underworld, a father in an Upstate prison, a smooth-talking son with an tenuous position at the top of the heap who begins grappling with what is right and what is wrong, and the bright, determined young woman with a child of her own whom Ty meets at school.

First-time author Allison van Diepen, who has concluded the Brooklyn phase of her teaching career and returned home to Canada, does an excellent job of bringing to life a sympathetic teen character who is caught up in a dangerous and truly despicable lifestyle.

With the experience of having been there with and for my father, Ty's unenviable situation has continued to stick in my mind long after stacking STREET PHARM on the booktalking pile.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com