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

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"Oh, save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no, no" -- World Party

"Some gangbanger leaned out of a bass-booming, cruising Mercedes, chucked a Dunkin' Donuts bag into the street. A flock of lean pigeons dropped down on the fresh trash.
"'How'd I get here?' Ray said to the pigeons.
"The pigeons didn't give a damn about Ray. They pecked that Dunkin' waste as if it were manna."

We never do learn how fourteen-year-old Ray got there -- how he ended up parentless or how he had originally fallen in with fifteen-year-old Jose. The pair are homeless-but-not-exactly-homeless in New York City: They have discovered and fixed up an old abandoned railroad stationhouse hidden deep in the woods of a West Harlem park. They've tapped into a streetlight for electricity and into the hub of a nearby apartment building for high speed cable service. They've dragged home an assortment of used-but-working appliances other people have thrown away and have stolen themselves a big screen TV. They've also attracted a pack of sweet, abandoned pit bulls. Occasionally they have to temporarily abandon ship when random pipe heads stumble upon the stationhouse and briefly hunker down to cook their methamphetamine.

But all in all, "As long as they kept a low profile they could do what they wanted, and they did."

Ray is a large, overweight, contemplative, and compassionate kid. He is also an obsessive reader and collector of information. Jose is the opposite -- small and ripped, a player, and a master of malapropisms. He's a functionally illiterate know-it-all adolescent hoodlum who is always scheming and never worrying "about what rotten thing might happen next."

Being that they are running together, Ray inevitably gets dragged along in the wake of Jose's dangerous and criminal schemes despite being offered a way out of that way of life by the proprietor of Yolanda's Braid Palace who, with her teenage niece, has seen the saving grace in Ray.

"'Four hours ago I'm promisin her I'm-a go clean, here I am again, hidin in the park bushes, lookin to boost an eighty-five-thousand-dollar ride that's gonna be used as an escape vehicle for drug runners, a hit maybe?"

TEN MILE RIVER is in equal parts grit and heart. A spectacular first novel by screenwriter Paul Griffin, it's got all the right stuff to make it a major favorite of adolescent reluctant readers and other fans of contemporary YA fiction. Readers will care about and will long continue to wonder about this sensitive beast of a teen who must learn to steer his own ship as he seeks to understand what it takes to become a man.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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