The writer has a skilled style that brings the reader right into the story line from the first paragraph – one brother frantically trying to get to another after hearing gunshots. Race knows it’s his brother Vince. The author powerfully creates a frightening gang life setting – Five buddies, Race, Wynn, Toon, and Pinky and Hawk, Wynn’s cousins. They were a rough pack of teenage boys resisting gang affiliation and running their own crimes of survival on the south side hood of Cincinnati known as Over The Rhine
The author brings her readers into the desperate home life of the boys where survival is a frightening struggle that is complicated and raw and demands crime as a way to live, to stay alive.
The pack began to fall apart without Vince and Wynn locked up. The writer adds a compassionate dimension where Race sets up a safe haven in an abandoned trailer in a salvage yard and becomes good friends with the junk yard dog he calls Monty Mutt. A wonderful element of hope amidst such tragedy. And as part of Race’s probation status after getting caught shoplifting he had to have a job and go to an alternative school. His job which he resisted begins to show him how other people live and treat one another. He is a driver for a blind man named Stan who fixes pianos and each home they go to offers Race one more opportunity to see life differently then he has lived.
The writer is brilliant in her style to balance good and evil. Race is in a war with himself to choose a broken loyalty to his pack and life of crime or begin to choose a better honest path he never thought was possible for him. The struggle for Race for loyalty to his old way of life and the promise of a new way of life tormented him terribly.
The writer has a powerful way of bringing this reader into every emotion as Race struggled to make the right choices so that his world could be colored brightly instead of drab like his brother Vince always said it would be. Anyone who has ever struggled with loyalty, right and wrong, how to survive against all odds, a conversion of heart where there was once no hope and just one person shows you that there is. This was an amazing book that moved me to tears as the dramatic life changing events unfolded. I recommend it highly.
“Let’s face it, the employment opportunities for our adults with disabilities are scarce at best,” says Karen Neville, “and the ones that came along were not the best fit for Kelly and her talents.”
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I was thrilled to receive this glowing review b